Physical machine convert to VM Machine

[DCSDavid]

I am wanting to take a production server and run the converter to create a test server.

I am not finding an issue with actually running the converter to convert the physical to a VM, however before I run the converter I would like to know if running the converter to convert the physical to a VM will affect my physical server in any way?

Thanks for any help?

[amslife]

If you do a hot migration, a driver will be installed that copies the server's contents while it's running. If this make you break out in hives and cold shakes, do a cold migration. There are lots of ways but the easiest is using the ColdClone.ISO available with Converter Enterprise / VirtualCenter Management Server. Logically what you're doing though is piping the contents of your source physical system's disks to the virtual disks attached to a newly provisioned virtual machine, something you can do manually using Ghost, opensource equivalents etc. After getting physical disk contents into your virtual disks, point Converter at the VM to modify the startup environment therein so it will boot with the virtual hardware.

[KyawH]

If you do a hot cloning (while physical machine is running during migration), VM converter will install an agent on your physical machine but you can automatically uninstall it upon finishing the conversion process or do it manually. Apart from that, there's no other modification whatsoever will be made on the source system.

During the hot cloning, there will be a lot of network streaming from your physical machine to destination host. Also converter agent will read all the blocks on your HDD of source system. So these are the side effect when doing the hot cloning. So to sum up, your physical source machine will be effected in terms of CPU, Memory, Disks and Network contention. From my past experience, most hot cloning of Windows boxes are fine since they are under utilized most of the time.

Hope this helps.

[rmitchell9]

what is the source OS? when I hot cloned win2k it installed the agent but also needed to reboot prior to making the clone..

[KyawH]

Good point rmitchell9. The physical machine will have to be rebooted after the agent installation if you are hot cloning on Windows 2000/NT4. Those are the Windows version that we all have known as "don't touch me, I will reboot myself" OSes..

[rmitchell9]

I suggest you make sure your win. updates are current prior to creating the VM p2v there is a issue with an incorrect version of scsiport.sys that may prevent your vm from booting (only win2k as far as I know)....the version we needed was 5.0.2195.7059 .. My VM did not boot... so we slaved the vmdk to another VM and that way we were able to put scsiport.sys into the drivers folder ... rsmoved the slaved drive and then booted it as its own VM and it was just fine... just an FYI ...