Migrating Physical Servers to VM's

[tmcd35]

Hi,

I hope you guys don't mind my endless supply of questions. I'm searching all over the net and forum for answers, but genuine advice from those who've been their is invaluable.

We have a sales rep from Misco coming to see us with a rep from VMWare next week. I want my head clear for that meeting so they can't try confusing us with technology and sell us things we don't need or can't afford!

Any way the question...

We have four main existing servers. We are looking to upgrade two of them and use them as our VM Hosts. How ever we can't loose any of the existing server functions/data provided by either of these machines.

So, is this scenario possible (or how does the Migration tool work?)...

Can we upgrade the hardware on one of the machines, Install the free VMWare server, then migrate the other machine into this VMWare environment, upgrade/reformat the othe machine and install VI3 - ESX and connect it to the SAN, move the migrated VM onto this new environment and then migrate the first server into this new environment before reformating and installing VI3 - ESX on this machine and load balancing!

Wow, it's a bit like that old 'Tower of Hanoi' game!

Terry.

[tmcd35]

Mmm, I think I can answer my own question - yes!

I've just re-read the VMWare Convertor pages and it appear that yes it does support converting a live Windows server into a VM on the free VMWare Server.

Then the Enterprise edition can convert that into an ESX vmdk once the first host and SAN are running.

Has anybody got any experience of doing this though? I'd like to here your thoughts on converting live servers in this way. Any advice or do's and don'ts I should be looking for here?

Cheers

Terry.

[esiebert7625]

Yes you can definitely do that. You can use VMware converter to migrate the one physical server to the VMware server, build the physical server into a ESX server and then migrate it to that with Converter again or by simply copying the virtual disk from the Server to ESX and using vmkfstools -i to import it. Then you create a new VM on the ESX server and tell it to use the existing disk.

[oreeh]

One word of caution: when live migrating servers shut down as many apps and services as possible - especially with database servers.

[esiebert7625 · Accepted solution]

You do not need Converter Enterprise for that, Enterprise basically only gets you the ability to cold-clone physical servers with a ISO CD. Converter Starter will convert to ESX if it is running directly on the PC or VM that you want to convert. My website has some info on it you may find useful. I've done dozens of conversions with Converter/P2V and it works well.

http://vmware-land.com/Converter.html

fyi...don't forget to award points for helpful answers

[tmcd35]

Aaah, hadn't realised the points system, will do - don't worry I seem to be coming up with ever more questions for those hungry to increase points