Upgrade Novell 5 to 6.5 then virtualize

[BoucheJ]

I am going to be upgrading Netware 5 boxes to 6.5 and then virtualizing them. Should I do a migration to another physcial server then virutalize it or would it be better to go straight to virtual? Ideas?

[JDLangdon]

What type of services are you running on Netware? If this is just your standard file and print servers, I would not migrate the existing servers. What I would do is create some new VM's and add them the the existing TREE as additional servers. Then I would consolidate all like services onto these new VM's.

Once all of the services have been moved to the new VM's I would begin to decommission the physical servers without actually virtualizing any existing OS's.

This way you will end up with a nice, clean, fresh, OS installation.

Hope this helps,

Jason

[GaryJBlake]

As an ex-Novell consultant I would agree with this approach you may even consider going over to Open Enterprise within a VM instead.

If your not wanting to build a fresh NetWare server then checkout this thread for P2V process http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=15710&start=10&tstart=0, none of the major P2V players support P2V for NetWare yet !!