Physical-to-Virtual Conversions using VMWare Converter 4.0

By mike

One of the tasks I’ve been working on for the past two months has been the conversion of a large number of physical servers to virtual machines using VMWare’s Converter 4.0. Once again, VMWare offers up a free product to get you sucked into it’s technology. I’ve used other P2V tools in the past, some paid for, and the technology has come a mighty long way.

For a free product, I’ve got to say this is an amazing piece of software and pretty bombproof if some basic steps are taken to maximize the chances of success with using it.  I hope to outline some basic steps you can take in order to up those chances, focusing on Windows 2000 and 2003. I can tell you I wish I had known a lot of this info previously when having performed some other clones…

Tip 1: Perform Live Migrations

The best way to perform P2V is by installing Converter on the source machine itself, then running the conversion while the operating system is up and running. So, a general process for this would be:

1. Install VMWare Converter on your source machine.
2. Reboot if necessary (Windows 2000) and then shut down all non-essential services.
   Shut down database servers, antivirus, the print spooler, Network Neighborhood, scheduled tasks, and so on. The point here is to get this Windows machine to the basics: server process, network connectivity, and the VMWare Converter services.
3. Start Converter and point it at the target VM host.
   Feel free to change disk parameters on the fly – you’ll find that if you’ve got a partitioned disk, you might want to break out those partitions to separate .vmdk files for better performance.

Tip 2: Remove Hardware-Specific Software Once the Conversion is Done

If you’re doing this process on a server, chances are you’ve got utility programs on there that are designed to interface with hardware that’s not going to be available on the VM. Some examples are IBM Director, Intel ProSet, and HP iLO and RAID array management tools. Keep in mind that I work on Compaq, IBM, and HP devices for the most part – post up any tips for Dell hardware if you have ‘em.

• If you have access to IBM’s support site, they make a utility called “dirclean” that helps to remove IBM Director, which oftentimes fails to uninstall.
• Intel offers a ProSet Uninstaller utility to help with removing ProSet – another utility the oftentimes fails to uninstall.
• Uninstall all HP utilities, including HP networking utilities.
  Go to the properties of an Ethernet connection, highlight the HP Networking Utility, and choose “Uninstall.” Reboot to complete.
• Even if you’ve uninstalled everything HP, get rid of any HP system shutdown services – in Server 2003, you can simply run this from the command line:

  sc delete sysdown
  sc delete cpqasm2

  In Windows 2000, you’ll want to delete those services from the reigstry (careful!)
  (HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services)

• Uninstall VMWare Converter.

Tip 3: Remove Hardware That’s No Longer There

This one’s a no-brainer once you think of it: get rid of hardware that the operating system has drivers for but no longer exists. But the way to get rid of that hardware is a little more hidden, no pun intended (you’ll see why). You can start up Device Manager in Windows by running devmgmt.msc from the Run menu, but it won’t necessarily show you everything you need to get rid of. To show all of those components, do the following:

1. From a command prompt, run

   set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1

2. Without exiting that command prompt, run

   devmgmt.msc

3. When the Device Manager comes up, click on View -> Show Hidden Devices. This should show you a whole slew of hardware that is slightly greyed out – it’s basically safe to remove anything that is greyed out, such as iLO Multifunction adapters, Intel Ethernet adapters, IBM RAID controllers, and so on.

Basically, these three major tips are what I follow whenever I P2V a server – and I’ve done roughly 50 of them over the last two months with a few hundred more to follow in the coming year. The failure rate, following these tips, should be pretty low.