VM /ETC

Posts Tagged ‘vmware converter’

It hasn’t happened to me yet, but enabling the Converter Enterprise plug-in apparently can crash your VC 2.5 Server. VMware Communities: Enabling Converter Enterprise Plugin … is a forum thread about the problem with some troubleshooting attempts and the resolution. From the VMware forum:

I had exactly the same problem and this was caused by a dll file confict, in my case I had an old version of the ssleay32.dll file in my windows\system32 directory. I removed the file and it now works correctly.

Yellow-bricks.com also reports on the problem with 2 posts and an alternative fix in the follow up – Part II post: Read the rest of this entry »

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 Read the rest of this entry »

VMware Communities: New Script for moving vm to another … contains a thread from this summer about cold migrating a VM from local storage of an ESX server to iSCSI storage. The post contains the code (original and updated versions) for a script to automate this process. The final version allows the migration of a VM to any ESX storage location. I have added the vm-relocate.sh script to the Files page as well.

This script is handy if you do not have Read the rest of this entry »

Vizioncore’s vConverter 3 claims to be faster than both Platespin’s PowerConvert and VMware’s VMConverter.

“vConverter enables lightning fast and easy conversions without disrupting the source physical system during the conversion process. There are never any reboots, no need to visit machines being converted, no software to install on the source and no downtime. A significant R&D effort and focus on conversion reliability and efficiency has resulted in the fine tuning of read/write/transfer algorithms and the creation of several mechanisms which result in impressive speed and conversion completion metric.”

Click here to see demos of recorded conversions. The first example is a freshly installed Read the rest of this entry »

If you have the time you can migrate Windows physical servers to virtual machines (P2V) or virtual machines back to physical servers (V2P) with Windows Backup. Use VMware Converter or your P2V tool of choice for faster conversions. VMware Converter Starter Edition is free, but you can’t use ESX as a destination.

Here’s a high level walk through of how it’s done with Windows Backup: Read the rest of this entry »

Vizioncore: vRanger Pro P2V-DR Module

Vizioncore’s new P2V-DR module adds the ability to create backups of running physical servers on centralized Windows storage.

“The P2V-DR Module in vRanger Pro leverages the robust conversion engine of Vizioncore’s vConverter software. The cloning method employed by vConverter is executed at the “block-level” as opposed to “file-level” which results in extremely fast & reliable conversions with superior completion rates and no data loss.”

Unlike Ghost or other products that allow you capture an image of a server for bare metal restores, Vizioncore’s new module captures the server image while the server is live, and those images are converted for restoring the image to a VM. This sounds similiar to Platespin’s P2I (physical to image) conversions.

Read the rest of this entry »

Quest is the parent company of Vizioncore. Look for some new VI monitoring tools from these guys soon, but for now check out:

vRanger (formerly ESXRanger) – is still the best VCB based solution for live VM backups IMHO. I am not sure of the general availability date, but the product will soon use MS VSS as well.

vReplicator (formerly ESXReplicator) – Service console based VM replication. The only solution that I know of at this time that goes the extra step and registers the replicated VM in the VI at the DR site.

vCharter – monitoring, drill down performance analytics, and charge back reporting tool

vMigrator –

“vMigrator provides a powerful tool that can support the upgrade process from ESX Server to VI3, by enabling smooth and seamless migrations to the new platform with minimal downtime even for complex environments.”

vOptimizer -

“vOptimizer is an advanced optimization solution that quickly and easily reduces a virtual machine’s virtual hard drive to the smallest size possible while optimizing Windows guest operating systems for speed and performance. “

vConverter – similar to VMware’s VMConverter in design but can also V2V

“vConverter enables fast and easy conversions without disrupting the source physical system during the conversion process. There are never any reboots, no need to visit machines being converted, no software to install on the source and no downtime. vConverter contains advanced disk and network I/O algorithms to ensure that the fastest possible conversions are executed, and extremely reliable block level cloning is performed to minimize any risk of data loss. “

vPackager – sounds like this product will give some competition to VMware’s LabManager

“With vPackager, customers can configure a Windows based VM with the applications and configurations they wish to distribute, then extract these changes to a compressed package. This package can be distributed without OS licensing implications and applied to similar VMs to merge the changes.”