Preparation is the key to help prevent physical-to-virtual, or P2V, migration failures with VMware Converter. In this tip, I'll give you step-by-step instructions on how to prepare your server for a hot clone. (Most of these steps can be skipped with cold clones, as the server's OS is not running during the conversion.)
In a previous installment of this series, we talked about what VMware Converter will do, hot cloning (which is when you make a P2V migration while the server is still online) vs. cold cloning (which is when you migrate after the server is offline), and which servers you should probably stay away from when using VMware Converter.
Below are the steps you should take to prepare your server for conversion.
Making the conversion
With these steps complete, we're ready to get started. Start the Converter Manager application and click the Import Machine button to start the Converter Wizard. Select your Source server, in this example we will choose Physical Computer. Select This Local Machine if running Converter on the source server, otherwise enter the hostname/IP and login information of the server to be converted. At the Source Data screen you have the option to select your disk volumes and re-size then larger or smaller if needed. Make sure you do not select any small utility partitions created by your hardware installation. What you decide here will determine which disk cloning method is used to copy your source data. If you do not change your drive sizes or increase them, then a block-level clone will be performed. If you decrease the size of your drives by any amount then a file-level clone will be performed instead.
When a block-level clone is performed, data is transferred from the source server disk to the destination server disk block-by-block. This method is faster but results in more data being copied (even empty disk blocks are copied). When a file-level clone is performed, data is instead transferred file-by-file,
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which is slower but results in less data being copied. So if you only have 5 GB of data on a 40 GB drive, then only the 5 GB is copied. It's a trade-off between the two methods between faster transfer speed versus reduced data size which often results in about the same time to copy the data. One potential caveat with the file-level copy is if you have a server with a huge amount of small files, it can take days to copy the data, and will sometimes fail. I experienced a server with 200,000+ 2 K files in one directory which brought the conversion to a crawl. Once I removed these files it completed in a few hours.
Next choose your destination server which is typically VirtualCenter (VC)/ESX. If you have a VC server managing a destination ESX server, it is best to choose the VC server first. Continue entering a VM name, host and datastore; at the Networks screen you can select one or more NIC's and networks to connect to.
My preference is to first connect the VM to an Internal Only vSwitch so it is isolated from the source server and I can power it on while the source server is still up. Once I verify that the newly created VM is functioning properly and I go through the post-clone procedures, I shutdown the source server and move the VM to the same network that the source server was on.
Finally select whether or not to install VMware Tools, enter any OS customization if necessary, select whether or not to power on the VM right after the conversion completes and click the Finish button to start the conversion process. Once the conversion starts you can monitor the progress in the task progress window.
In our final part to this series we will discuss troubleshooting failed conversions and post-conversion procedures.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Eric Siebert is a 25-year IT veteran with experience in programming, networking, telecom and systems administration. He is a guru-status moderator on the VMware community VMTN forums and maintains VMware-land.com, a VI3 information site.
