VMware converter

P2V’ing old Windows NT servers with less than 264 MB of RAM

So you’ve been tasked with consolidating a bunch of old servers. You break out the old VMware converter cold clone cd and you start going to town. But then you come across an old Windows NT server with less than 264 MB of RAM. You put the CD in the drive and you boot to CD, you wait for a painstakingly long time and eventually an error spits out on the screen. You don’t have enough RAM to run the CD!

The VMware cold clone cd requires at least 264 MB of RAM to run. Now in this day and age with most servers this is not really an issue. However with old Windows NT boxes this poses a big problem. There’s also no Windows NT install for converter. What do you do?

Well if you still have an old VMware P2V Assistance CD and license kicking around you could use that. Of course if you don’t have that, what are your options? Well, if you can’t create a new virtual server and transfer the services from the old server to the new server you’re probably stuck with disk cloning like Ghost.

Ghost isn’t a trouble free process but it should get the job done with a bit of tweaking.

-RP

Converting a virtual machine to ESXi Server

Now with ESXi being free, a lot of people find themselves using it. One of the things people want to be doing is converting their existing servers and importing them into their new ESXi server.

Another thing you can do is take any existing virtual machines you might have setup under VMware Workstation and import those in as well. The question I’ve received is how do you do this? When you start up VMware converter there is no option for ESXi.

Well never fear, the answer is quite simple really. Just use the option for ESX. This will allow it to P2V or convert your existing virtual machines from VMware Workstation into your ESXi server without any issues.

-RP