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» VIEW ALL POSTS Mar 7 2007   1:11AM GMT

P2V blues: Physical-to-virtual migration mishaps



Posted by: Jan Stafford
Uncategorized, VMware, P2V

While researching P2V migrations, I came across some discussions of problems encountered during the process.

Dave Mast, Geek at Large, learned this lesson about P2V migrations and shared it on his blog:

“This Tuesday we attempted a P2V (Physical-to-Virtual) conversion on our domain controller.  It worked, but not as well as I expected.  We wound up losing the SYSVOL share (where all your group policy stuff is kept) during the conversion.  We still had our physical machine present, so we fired it back up and all was well.”

Mast is prepared for his next P2V experience. “I set up a second domain controller and stuck it in one of the IDFs.  Hopefully the domain data will replicate from the new DC to the old, and if not, we can always start from scratch with a new VM.”

Here’s a thread about Exchange problems in P2V migrations. It’s a tale of many crashes.

Another informative P2V migration tale comes from Scott Lowe’s blog. He talks about using VMware Converter. Here’s a tidbit, but you should check out the whole entry:

“The only odd thing we ran into was that Converter refused to log in to VirtualCenter. We tried short hostname, fully qualified hostname, and IP address, and still had zero luck getting Converter to connect to VC. Fortunately, connecting directly to one of the ESX servers using the root account worked without any problems whatsoever, and the overall conversion process took about 1 hour and 20 minutes to move the 12 to 13 gigabytes of data on the source server.”

I’m still looking for P2V migration stories — successes and failures — to help me build a best practices and “beware” guide. Got any tales to tell? Add a comment, please, or send me an email at  jstafford at techtarget.com.

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Jan Stafford  |   Mar 8 2007   10:31PM GMT

Dan Miller, computer technician with Prairie Valley School Division, tell me he’s found a resource that helped him with P2V. Says Dan:

“I have a few kinks to work out yet but I did have a lot of success using the methods posted on the link below. I can’t take credit for the knowledge but the guy who created the how to on this link deserves credit for his work when doing a P2V. Works great where VSMT won’t, and if you use Altiris imaging, it’s right up the alley. Once again,it’s not my knowledge or creation; just sharing a link that had a great way to perform this.
 <a href="http://www.stalltheball.com/index.php/2006/08/01/how_to_migrate_a_server_from_physical_to" title="http://www.stalltheball.com/index.php/2006/08/01/how_to_migrate_a_server_from_physical_to" target="_blank">http://www.stalltheball.com/index.php/20…</a>


 

Scott Lowe  |   Mar 16 2007   10:31PM GMT

As it turns out, the problem with VMware Converter connecting to VirtualCenter turned out to be a strange configuration issue with VirtualCenter not listening on the default TCP port. Once we had that issue straightened out (we discovered this while performing some testing with VMware Consolidated Backup), then VMware Converter worked much more smoothly.

Hope this helps someone else out,
Scott


 

John  |   Mar 19 2007   7:26AM GMT

I’m glad people are finding the methods I posted useful. I have come across other issues including hangs at “acpitabl.dat” etc.

Some of it is related to using SCSI or IDE on the original server versus the Virtual Server. Others are down to hotfixes and figuring out which hal.dll and ntoskrnl works with which level of hotfixing is proving to be very difficult. So perhaps if someone has done a P2V in the last week they could comment on which files they used, where they took them from and how up to date their hotfixing was?

Regards

John


 

Server Virtualization Blog » P2V wins, losses: VMware Converter  |   Mar 26 2007   3:34PM GMT

[...] Language support issues on VMware Converter caused several P2V mishaps for Robert Sieber of SHD System-Haus-Dresden GmbH in Dresden, Germany. Responding to my blog entry on physical-to-virtual (P2V) migration mishaps, he wrote: “Mainly all of our tries to migrate from physical to virtual or virtual to virtual failing at 97%. It looks like if there is an issue with the language of the underlying OS. We used German OSes for installing VMware converter and now we are trying to use only English ones. Since we switched to English success rate is somewhat better. “I really hope that the people who developed ESX server are much better than the one who developed Converter and Capacity Planner.” [...]


 

Dugie’s Pensieve » Blog Archive » Speedlinking #711 - VM maximums, Community, P2V and Powershell  |   Aug 16 2007   9:08PM GMT

[...] P2V blues: Physical-to-virtual migration mishaps - Keeps popping up, therefore I can only assume lots of people keep having problems [...]


 

Simon PC Frost  |   Mar 28 2008   5:51PM GMT

We have the 2% blues. No mater which physical we use, when attempting to migrate any physical box to the ESX cluster, either by host or through the VMVC, it sits blankly staring at the moon for hours on end, never going past 2%.

What’s weird is that the host file for the C: drive of the virtual that’s created as part of one of the first steps of the migration is constantly updated. Nothing else useful happens.

-sf


 
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