Comments on: P2V blues: Physical-to-virtual migration mishaps

By: Simon PC Frost

Simon PC Frost — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 22:51:52 +0000

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

By: Dugie’s Pensieve » Blog Archive » Speedlinking #711 - VM maximums, Community, P2V and Powershell

Fri, 17 Aug 2007 02:08:34 +0000

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

By: Server Virtualization Blog » P2V wins, losses: VMware Converter

Server Virtualization Blog » P2V wins, losses: VMware Converter — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 20:34:13 +0000

[...] 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.” [...]

By: John

John — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 12:26:54 +0000

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

By: Scott Lowe

Scott Lowe — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 03:31:12 +0000

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

By: Jan Stafford

Jan Stafford — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 03:31:45 +0000

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.
http://www.stalltheball.com/index.php/20…