P2V Solaris 10 x86

[grym68]

Hi

How to P2V Solaris (x86-64bits) to VMware x86 Virtual Machine?

Thanks

[rajeshkongu]

Hi,

kindly look at the thread.

http://communities.vmware.com/message/1499910

Regards,

Karthick

[yike]

rajeshkongu wrote:

Hi,

kindly look at the thread.

http://communities.vmware.com/message/1499910

Regards,

Karthick

That thread doesn't apply ... that is specific to Solaris on SPARC and this thread is asking about Solaris on X86.  World of difference.

[continuum]

Hi
no version of the VMware Converter supports Solaris - so you have to do this completely manually.

Step 1. create a diskimage - a dd-image of the whole disk would do.
Step 2. create a vmdk descriptor-file for the dd-image
Step 3. create a new Solaris VM and add the imported vmdk
Step 4. try to boot the VM

Step 5. use single user mode or a Solaris LiveCD to adjust the system to the new hardware

[robhall1]

I just went through this process for about 15 machines going from XEN Server over to VMWare.

The process is quite a bit more complicated than would be expected. Primarily since getting Solaris

conditioned for execution within VMWare takes some time and effort.

Agreed you can get the image over and into ESX pretty easily.   Getting the devices and networking and

bootup process to work is where the fun is.   Detailed it completely in.

http://www.horizonsystems.com/forum/13-virtualization-central/54-solaris-10-x8664-conversion-to-vmware-howto

Hope it's helpful. Took me quite a bit of time and research to get a working procedure that was replicatable.

[continuum]

thanks a lot for sharing

[dbeckman]

To "robhall1":

Thanks so much for posting that! I just ran a successful P2V of a Solaris 10 x86_64 box running on an HP Proliant DL380 G4.

In my case, after the P2V, I did not have to edit /etc/vfstab, probably because I had root on ZFS. All I did was boot into rescue mode, allow it to mount 'rpool' on /a, then simply 'reboot' and on the next boot it came up fine, except for the networking. I had one non-global zone configured, so after moving /etc/hostname.<interface> to the new device, I also had to run 'zonecfg' and change the "physical" interface for that zone, and reboot it. Also, for some reason the P2V did not create Ethernet devices at all, so I had to add them afterwards (Intel e1000).

This worked fine working with a vCenter version 5.1. I'm glad it worked, but I do worry that it won't for future versions. And I don't get why VMware won't at least make the ISO available, with the caveat that it's unsupported. They've been acting more and more like Oracle. :-)

As of this writing, the site you referenced appears to be down. I was able to access it through Google's cache.

Thanks,

Daniel

[robhall1]

Daniel,

     Yes, that would make sense since zfs identifies itself differently for mounting.   Agree completely, the coldclone ISO was an awesome tool for getting this done.

     Wish more effort had been put into keeping it around.

     Website is fixed now. I am truly surprised at the number of people that found this useful, and glad it has helped.  (and that google cache is around) :-)

     Best to you!

- Robert

[stanj]

I am not sure the thread is active, but I thought I would give it a shot

We have a set of image files sent to us by a customer. Not sure of the software used to create the images. DD possibly

The images were taken from various physical servers with various operating systems (Linux, Solaris, Windows).

We used StarWinds free converter to convert the images to vmdk files.

Using VMware Workstation, we are able to create a VM and add the converted vmdk as the system disk.

We then used VMware converter  to covert the VMs and move them over to ESXi Server 6.0.

We are able to boot a majority of the Linux VMs (RHEL 6).

However,  Solaris boots up and goes into a boot loop...

Is there a mod required ? 

Starwind posted a response we need to check a box you want to patch hardware for the new hypervisor ...however, I have not tried this yet