P2V a Suse Linux Enterprise Server
Yellow-bricks.com posted a quick article today about successfully p2v-ing a SLES server. (Yes, I know that’s redundant but it just doesn’t sound right saying “p2v a SLES”). The post was of interest to me because I briefly attempted to do the same back in December without success.
In my experience we attempted to use the VMware Converter Cold Clone CD but got a message similar to unrecognized operating system. I do not remember the exact error message, but the VMware Converter Live CD was unusable . The customer then used Ghost to make an image of the physical server, and restored that image to a “bare-virtual-metal” VM. When booting the SLES VM the boot volume was not found, or unmountable. Since this particular VM
was out of scope for the project we moved on and the customer was going to rebuild and migrate the server manually. I did some basic research later and sent the client a link to using the rescue cd, but I never heard back if that process actually worked on future SLES p2v migrations.
The post at yellow-bricks.com is not exactly what I experienced, but it makes sense that choosing a new install would solve most migration problems and be the simplest solution.
From the yellow-bricks post
I just P2V’ed a Suse Linux Server with the cold boot iso. When booting I was confronted with a kernel panic. This is caused by the fact that the modules for the LSI Logic or Bus Logic SCSI card aren’t available, which causes the root volume to be unmountable. I tried to boot from the installation CD with the “rescue” option but this did not provide me with a fast solution for the problem. But the following was a quick fix:
- Boot from Suse CD
- Select to setup a new system
- Select to boot from the currently installed OS
- Run Yast and configure the correct SCSI controller
- Remove all the NICS and configure a new NIC
- Install VMware tools
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