Best practice for p2v- When do I shut down the physical machine?

[rfish11]

After performing a p2v conversion, when should I shut down the physical machine? By default the vm is powered off after the conversion and assigned a DHCP address and not the static address that was on the physical machine...why is this? Should not the VM be a duplicate...perhaps it is a setting I am missing on the conversion.

Just looking for a best pratice process for p2v conversions.

Using Virtual Center 2.5 and the built-in converter.

Thanks, Rick

[jayolsen]

This link has some good tips http://communities.vmware.com/thread/96163

The IP information would need to be recreated on the VM because the p2v process replaces the hardware, the network configuration is tied to the network adapter.

Remember you wouldn't want both machines powered on and connected to the network with the same IP address.

[vmroyale]

Hello and welcome to the forums.

I tend to do the conversion and choose to not power the VM on afterwards. When the conversion completes, I make hardware changes as required, and then make sure that "Connect at Power On" is not checked under the device status for the network adapter(s). Now you can power up the virtual machine and do whatever you need to do to it to get it ready (uninstall old management software, change HALs, etc) without fear of it being on the network with the same name and/or IP address. Once everything looks good in Device Manager, Event Viewer, etc - I shut down the physical server and then power up the VM with a "connected" network adapter for testing.

Another option would be to use the "Customize the identity of the virtual machine" option towards the end of the Import Wizard, if you need to be able to have both the physical server and the virtual machine on the network at the same time. This customization will allow you to give the VM a new server name and SID, and then you could just assign a different IP address to it.

Good Luck!

[RDPetruska]

Thread moved to Converter forum.