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vnware convertor and physical host.

 
T G Manikandan
Honored Contributor

vnware convertor and physical host.

I have my physical hosts live on the network.

Initially , I thought to reconfigure everything on the VM by doing a fresh install.
Now, I have come across the vmware convertor,which seems very simple.

Can I just convert my physical server with applications to a VM directly, like cloned?
The data is on SAN on my physical host, when I move to VM, will that create a new copy on the allocated drive i.e. copy all data from volumes on physical hosts to VM?
I dont want to bring down my physical host, unless the VM is done with UAT/testing. Is that possible to have data copy and a new ip so this new VM system (created from Physical host) does not impact the original source system.

Please provide your suggestions. I am new to vmware.
4 REPLIES 4
Uwe Zessin
Honored Contributor

Re: vnware convertor and physical host.

VMware converter offers some nice features when virtualizing Windows servers (like resizing or skipping of disks, splitting partitions into independend disks, ...), but I do prefer a clean install.

This ensures an OS installation without too much history like, e.g. uninstalled hardware drivers and agents.
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Steven Clementi
Honored Contributor

Re: vnware convertor and physical host.

" Is that possible to have data copy and a new ip so this new VM system (created from Physical host) does not impact the original source system."

You can go as far as creating a "dummy" Vm Network that you can switch the VM to after you convert it... to bring it up live with it's proper IP address and all... all while the physical server is up and running.

While on this "dummy" network.. it won;t communicate with anything else... can't see anything else...


As mentioned, you can just convert to a VM directly, but your physical hardware will go away and virtual hardware will take its place. You will need to re-configure the IP address on the server once converted. The adaptor may show up as... Local Area Connection 2 (if you had 2 physical adaptors in the machine originally) or some higher number depending on what was there originally.

If you have the oppurtunity to re-install a fresh OS... I would do that. You can always copy the data outside of converting the physical box to virtual.


Steven
Steven Clementi
HP Master ASE, Storage, Servers, and Clustering
MCSE (NT 4.0, W2K, W2K3)
VCP (ESX2, Vi3, vSphere4, vSphere5, vSphere 6.x)
RHCE
NPP3 (Nutanix Platform Professional)
Jan Soska
Honored Contributor

Re: vnware convertor and physical host.

Hello,
we did such conversion many times, it works, but the you still need do som reconfiguration - removing all hardware agents, change SAN zones.

So - it works but SAN disk in your server makes it more complicated.

Jan
Modris Bremze
Esteemed Contributor

Re: vnware convertor and physical host.

We've done a number of such live conversions. The data on SAN disks will be copied to new virtual disks (one new disk per mount point), you will be able to change the size of these new disks. The physical server can stay up during the process, but it is advisable to minimize the I/O, so the process finishes faster and there are less chances of something going wrong. The IP address should be available to change for the newly created VM during the conversion.
The most common problem we've had is that with the network interfaces, but it is usually easily corrected. Otherwise the converter has been a real time-saver.