Moving physical machines into Virtual Machines with VMWare Converter
Category VMWare Converter
This weekend, I moved my 4 physical servers that I have at an external hosting site to a single hosted server running VMWare ESXi. My existing hosting center was in Atlanta I believe and the new one is somewhere in Texas I think, I don't ever visit the servers physically so it doesn't really matter, unless I add new servers and want the in the same location. So I have these 4 servers running Windows 2003 Enterprise Edition, how do I get them across to the new VMware ESXi server? Well there are a few options:
1: Take the machines backups, and restore them into a new virtual windows on the ESXi server. Hope that your backups all worked correctly (which they should as you check them regularly right?)
2. Reinstall windows, move across the Domino files, reinstall etc. Do the same for the Sametime 8.5 servers.
3. Use VMware Convert to move the physical machine to a virtual machine.
I went for option 3 and it was actually pretty easy. I installed VMWare converter on each server and did a convert from local machine to a virtual infrastructure host, pointing at the ESXi server. I made one mistake though, I took default settings, which I didn't find out until after the 8 hours it took to move the Gbs of disks in the first server across and then failed to boot, with a black screen and a flashing cursor. VMWare converter when it moved the file, changed the disk controller type, which stopped the machine booting. To stop this happening, when you move the disk, make sure you set the disk type to LSI SCSI and you should be fine.
If you discover this after you have already moved the machine, this technote should help Converting a virtual IDE disk to a virtual SCSI disk I wish I had discovered that technote, as I moved the whole thing again with the new setting.
One of the other reasons I chose option 3 over the other options, was that the conversion could happen whilst the servers were still running. So the QA folks could still run tests against the servers whilst they were being migrated across.
So after updating DNS, changing a few security fields on the servers with new IP addresses and permissions etc. the 4 physical servers were moved and are now running as Virtual Machines inside an ESXi server.
For anyone wondering what kind of savings moving to Virtual Machines can bring. This single event is saving my company $900 dollars a month. That covers an employees healthcare, so nothing to be sneezed at.
This weekend, I moved my 4 physical servers that I have at an external hosting site to a single hosted server running VMWare ESXi. My existing hosting center was in Atlanta I believe and the new one is somewhere in Texas I think, I don't ever visit the servers physically so it doesn't really matter, unless I add new servers and want the in the same location. So I have these 4 servers running Windows 2003 Enterprise Edition, how do I get them across to the new VMware ESXi server? Well there are a few options:
1: Take the machines backups, and restore them into a new virtual windows on the ESXi server. Hope that your backups all worked correctly (which they should as you check them regularly right?)
2. Reinstall windows, move across the Domino files, reinstall etc. Do the same for the Sametime 8.5 servers.
3. Use VMware Convert to move the physical machine to a virtual machine.
I went for option 3 and it was actually pretty easy. I installed VMWare converter on each server and did a convert from local machine to a virtual infrastructure host, pointing at the ESXi server. I made one mistake though, I took default settings, which I didn't find out until after the 8 hours it took to move the Gbs of disks in the first server across and then failed to boot, with a black screen and a flashing cursor. VMWare converter when it moved the file, changed the disk controller type, which stopped the machine booting. To stop this happening, when you move the disk, make sure you set the disk type to LSI SCSI and you should be fine.
If you discover this after you have already moved the machine, this technote should help Converting a virtual IDE disk to a virtual SCSI disk I wish I had discovered that technote, as I moved the whole thing again with the new setting.
One of the other reasons I chose option 3 over the other options, was that the conversion could happen whilst the servers were still running. So the QA folks could still run tests against the servers whilst they were being migrated across.
So after updating DNS, changing a few security fields on the servers with new IP addresses and permissions etc. the 4 physical servers were moved and are now running as Virtual Machines inside an ESXi server.
For anyone wondering what kind of savings moving to Virtual Machines can bring. This single event is saving my company $900 dollars a month. That covers an employees healthcare, so nothing to be sneezed at.
| Permalink | 
Comments
Posted by Karen Dixon At 03:57:05 PM On 04/27/2010 | - Website - |