We have several VM's that are running on the Windows VMWare Server (free) product that we now need to convert over to ESX. I have been searching and reading for a concise method for converting these VM's. Everything I find points me to Converter but when I go and try to convert using it I seem to get errors trying to read the source VM's(using Import/Stand Alone I get unable to determine guest OS). Is there a How-to or guide that anyone knows of that can walk me through the process? I have about 9-10 of these that I need to convert.
I just performed several conversions going from Server to ESX myself and found a couple of issues you may want to take into consideration. I suppose you probably know this, but it will go much easier if the VM is shut down while you are converting it. The converter doesn't seem to like VMs with snapshots, try clearing out any old snapshots for the VM before you convert it. The only other issue I found with Converter was the virtual disk size, if you are transferring several gigs of data (16GB seemed to be the sticking point for me) you may want to manually copy the VM files to the machine you are running converter on and push them up to ESX from there. Of course, there are always the general bandwidth issues to consider if you are moving VMs across a WAN link or congested subnets you may want to consider setting up a seperate machine on that segment for converting VMs.
Thanks for the help. I didn't know about the snapshots. I have tried copying the files locally to my converter PC and I did have them shutdown. Most of my VM's are large in size but since they are live servers I will have to run most of these after hours which will eliminate any bandwidth issues.
I still keep getting an error about not being able to determine the guest operating system. Any ideas why that is happening?
I didn't get any 'unable to determine guest OS' errors myself but from what I can tell they can be kind of hard to nail down. The most common cause seems to be an issue with the boot.ini file in the VM, you may want to make sure it's correct. The VM can develop it's own file system issues so a chkdsk /f might not be a bad idea. You might want to check the OS that's specified in the VM settings too. I know I did have some VMs that I tried to convert and they wouldn't work until I rebooted the system with Converter installed on it and the system with VMware Server installed on it. I just chalked that up to general Windows memory management or lack there of.
Just FYI for anyone else wondering how to do this. What I did was ran converter and told it that my source was a physical server. I then stepped throught the wizard giving it a destination of the ESX server and it works. I have moved over 10 Windows Server VM's to ESX. The good thing is I didn't have to change IP addresses on the NIC's after it was done like I did when converting the original physical servers to VM's. I powered the old Windows VM down and powered up the new ESX server. Though I did remove things like the USB, serial ports ect before I booted it the first time. I hope this is helpful to someone else!
