Bare metal to VM and lost network settings

[powerbits]

Client site, IBM System x3650 running VMware ESX Server 3i in turn running four Windows Server 2003 servers.

Client has decided on this approach for DRP. Three of the servers have been made VMs from bare metal servers back at Head Office. One problem noted with bringing them up in the VM environment is that they have lost the original network settings - which makes sense given that the adaptor is different. But it would nice if it was otherwise i.e. the static IP, DNS settings and gateway could be part of the VM network adaptor settngs. What are the options? Can this be set as part of building the VM? Or it it possible to create a virtual adaptor on a bare metal server? Other?

A newbie question - please be patient...

Thanks!

David

[Erik_Zandboer]

Hi David,

It is no different from plugging a new network adapter in a physical machine. You would not be able to impose NIC settings on that new device before it is actually detected by the OS. A VM with a new virtual adapter is no different.

You will have to do the IP settings manually. Beware: When you P2V a machine, it is a best practice to "clean" the resulting VM from all (now unavailable) hardwaredrivers, together with hardware specific utilities (like raid adapter software, hardware monitoring software etc). Manually inserting the IP data is only a small part of the total cleaning process!

Visit my blog at http://erikzandboer.wordpress.com

[powerbits]

Thanks for your reply Erik. Do you have a link on "cleaning" the VM after P2V?

I understand that the current arrangement requires a manual fix. What I don't know is if there is a way to avoid that, for example, by implementing a new virtual adapter on the bare metal.

The more steps that can be eliminated from a DRP scenario the better!

[Erik_Zandboer]

Hi, you cannot circumvent this issue. Adding hardware to a windows install without actually adding hardware is hard to say the least (maybe impossible- I have never seen this done). I have never seen a complete manual for it, although every consultant performing P2V has one (should have one!). Basically, uninstall all software which is hardware related (no hardware to monitor any more inside the VM), and remover all unused hardware using a trick called "show nonpresent devices" as desrcibed here:

Visit my blog at

[NTurnbull · Accepted solution]

As Erik has said, remove all drivers and hardware (com ports, serial ports, floppy, nic etc...) from the vm. One of the gotchas that you can run into after the P2V is sometimes the old IP settings are held on to and you can't even assign the same IP address to the new virtual nic because windows has that IP binded to the old physical nic. This is when you'll need to run the "show non present devices" so that you can remove the old nic from device manager to release the IP info held in the registry. You'll probably have to reboot the vm before you can assign the IP back to the new virtual nic.

Thanks,

Neil

[powerbits]

Thanks to both of you.