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More options Mar 18, 5:40 am
Newsgroups: microsoft.public.virtualserver
From: "Sylvain Lafontaine"
Date: Sat, 17 Mar 2007 13:40:47 -0400
Local: Sun, Mar 18 2007 5:40 am
Subject: Re: Migrating a physical server as VM
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Yes, there are other tools to migrate a physical machine to a virtual. However, it's not always easy and with some of these tools/methods, you will have to make a reparation step to replace the HAL layer before Windows will be able to boot under its new virtualized environment. The ACPI set up in the BIOS is also another thing that you must check up before making the P2V migration:
http://www.rtfm-ed.co.uk/docs/vmwdocs/whitepaper-upgrading-cpus-on-no...
http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2004/11/24/269412.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2004/11/30/272662.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2004/12/10/279667.aspx
Here are some other automated tools or manual methods for doing your P2V (Physical to Virtual) migration:
http://4sysops.com/archives/p2v-for-vmware-migrate-physical-to-virtua...
http://www.invirtus.com/content/view/808/394/
http://www.acronis.com/enterprise/products/ATISWin/universal-restore....
http://www.vmware.com/products/beta/converter/
http://www.rtfm-ed.eu/docs/vmwdocs/whitepaper-ultimatep2v-quickstart.pdf
In the case of VMWare converter, you will have to convert it back to VHD but only after removing the previous VMWare additions; see:
http://vmtoolkit.com/files/default.aspx http://vmtoolkit.com/blogs/paul/archive/2006/12/14/preparing-a-window...
If you want to use an imaging software like Ghost or Acronis, you will have to set up a second virtual environment for the sole purpose of restoring an image directly to a vhd: first you create two empty VHD then you attach them to the virtual environment as second and third virtual hard drives, you copy the image file(s) to the second hard drive and you restore it to the third one. All you have to do now is to detach this last vhd and use it as the main virtual hard drive for creating a new virtual environment. (There are other methods like using a booting DVD or a network connectin but these are often more complicated to set up.)
When using some older imaging softwares, it's also a good idea to partition the target VHD before making the restoration to make sure that the master boot record on the virtual drive has been correctly written or you can take the precaution of imaging the whole physical hard drive which is used as the source instead of just backing/restoring a single partition (and you must do it even if there is only one single partition on it); otherwise the MBR might be incorrectly written on the target virtual drive after the restoration. (Probably that you won't have this problem with a more recent version of these softwares but it's better to be safe then sorry.)
You might have some other problems, for example if your operating system was on the D:\ drive and you want it now to be on the C:\ drive. For a discussion of this, take a look at:
http://help.lockergnome.com/windows/Cloned-Drive-Ghost-10-Log-Drive-f...
http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.windowsxp.hardware/br...
-- Sylvain Lafontaine, ing. MVP - Technologies Virtual-PC E-mail: sylvain aei ca (fill the blanks, no spam please)
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