p2v

Another way to P2V NT

Hello again folks! This is an update to a previous blog post. So I was P2V’ing another Windows NT server the other day and I was able to get P2V to work with an older version of VMware converter.

VMware converter version 3.0.3 is the version I used and it installed into Windows NT just fine (reboot required). Then I was able to launch the application and connect to my ESXi server and launch the conversion of the physical machine.

This means I was able to do a hot clone of Windows NT 4. I hate working with NT boxes but at least we have an easy method to virtualize them. A lot of NT servers out there are on ailing hardware that is not on warranty so having a method to hot clone them is always a good thing!

-RP

Hot imaging Linux servers to a virtual environment

Hi folks, I wanted to discuss hot imaging of Linux servers. Often you will run into a situation where you need to migrate an existing Linux server into a virtual environment.

The downside is that you might not want to power it down to do this and use something like VConverter or PlateSpin Migrate. These products can hot image Windows servers but can’t hot image Linux servers. So what do you end up doing? Acronis!

Acronis True Image Echo Enterprise Server can hot image a server and then you can use the program to convert the image into a VMDK file which you can then import into an existing virtual machine. Then presto, you have a virtualized Linux server without ever having to down the existing older Linux server.

The only caveat is you have to install an Acronis agent on the Linux server to accomplish this. In order for the agent to install successfully you will require the kernel source to be installed. But then you can install the agent without requiring any reboots.

Happy imaging!

-RP