P2V

Red Hat to improve VM conversion tools

BOSTON -- By nature, virtual machines (VMs) are movers and shakers. The tools in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6 perform the essential tasks of virtual-to-virtual (V2V) conversions,...

Making a P2V conversion: Tricks for systems with large storage

Converting a system with a large amount of locally attached storage can be a challenging task given the time required to perform the conversion. Here area a few tricks I've found that can help ease the pain on these types of conversion tasks.

• Private network: Making a...

Making a P2V conversion: Driver cleansing

Successful physical-to-virtual (P2V) conversions revolve around getting the virtual environment correct before presenting the actual workload to the new VM. In this video blog, Rick Vanover discusses some conversion tasks that can help a VM function optimally as the workload goes virtual from a...

Making a P2V conversion: Stage-phase configuration

A well-documented procedure for physical-to-virtual (P2V) conversions still lacks the valuable information learned by experience. In this video blog, Rick Vanover introduces the stage configuration phase of a P2V conversion. When this phase and other phases of a conversion are used in a procedural...

OEM + old machine + P2V migration = Murphy’s law

OK, I had a foul up in my last post about my physical-to-virtual (P2V) migration journey. I used Vizioncore's vConverter in my file server P2V migration, and it...

P2V migration success, thanks to Robocopy

...and no thanks to VMware Converter Enterprise or Vizioncore's vConverter.  The situation: a very successful physical-to-virtual (P2V) migration, with only two servers to go. Both original equipment manufacturer (OEM) boxes. One is a Windows 2003 Server File/Print/VMware...

Antivirus management issues in physical-to-virtual migrations

I am well into my company's physical to virtualization (P2V) migration for most general purpose server systems, and it's been pretty successful. But as our environment grew, we experienced a problem involving our virtual systems and our antivirus management system. In this blog post, I'll explain...

Don’t omit the VMware Tools!

So, you are very proud of yourself because you can roll out Windows virtual systems like popcorn, right? Well, don't forget to ensure that you are using the correct version of VMware tools. This is important because it provides an optimized inventory of hardware for the guest operating system. On a...

Once upon a time, there was a VI3 migration…

I found another blog post-worthy blog. Rightfully called "Documenting a virtualization project", it's pretty darn cool. Read about one company's experience with virtualizing their servers from the start. Most recently, the author,...

Physical-to-virtual (P2V) migration blooper

Since I wrote the post, P2V wins and losses, I've been hearing from IT managers who've done the P2V deed. One migration was halted by a too-proactive IT guy. Here's the story, but I'll let...