POLL: POWERSHELL VS. GUI - DO YOU WANT TO BE A DEVOP OR AN ADMIN?
VMware Converter 3.0 final – first impressions
By Michael Pietroforte - g+ - Thu, February 1, 2007 - 4 comments Michael Pietroforte is a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) with more than 28 years of experience in system administration.
The final of VMware Converter 3.0 is now available for download. I reviewed VMware Converter 3 Beta sometime ago. I liked the tool, but it was a bit unreliable. The final seems to work better, although, I only converted one machine using VMware Converter 3 Starter Edition.
For my first test, I used a virtual machine instead of a physical one running under VMware Workstation 5.5. However, I told VMware Converter that it is a physical machine. To my surprise, it really worked. I remotely connected to this VM telling VMware Converter the IP and the credentials.
As destination I chose a shared folder on the same machine where VMware Converter was running. My source system, i.e. the VM running on VMware Workstation, was also on this computer. So, there was only one physical machine involved in my test. As destination format, I used VMware Workstation/Server. You can also convert to the ESX format.
My source machine was running Windows Server 2003 SP1 and had one hard disk with about 4 GB space occupied. The good news is that you can also use VMware Converter to resize a virtual disk. When I tested the Beta I wasn’t sure if the the Starter Edition would have this feature.
The whole conversion process took me just a couple of minutes. After 99% VMware Converter stopped the conversion telling me that it failed. But the new VM worked without any problems.
I didn’t find any hints in the logs why I got the error message. By the way, it is quite complicated to access these log files. You have to use Windows Explorer on the source machine to access the log files of the agent. VMware Converter has its own log files. Why can’t I access all these log files from the VMware Converter user interface?
I like VMware Converter 3. After all, the Starter Edition is for free. I’ll probably convert some “real” physical machine soon with it. Stay tuned!
10 Ways To Transfer Files Between Virtual Machines
After working on my series about VMware player, I found a few different ways to get files onto and off the Virtual Machines. To give people some ideas, maybe ones they wouldn’t have thought of, or didn’t even know of. This isn’t a com…
Using MS Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1, I installed VMWare Converter 3.0.1 onto the latest Microsoft “virtual appliance” edition of Windows Server 2008 Beta 3.
I then launched the converter, told it I wanted to convert the “physical machine” (I tip I found on another blog), but got the error “Task failed: P2VError UNABLE_TO_DETERMINE_GUEST_OS()”.
This same scenario worked fine with the WIN03_MOSS “virtual appliance” (also orginally designed to work only with Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1), so I suspect VMWare Converter 3.0.1 isn’t capable of converting Windows Server 2008 Beta 3 VM’s to an equivalent VMWare VM.
Found the upgrade from 3.0 to 3.0.1 helped a lot. Converter very good about checking for space, and allowing more. We’re presently using the unlicensed version, to migrate antique servers that are physically dying, but have old applications that are too intensive (or unknown) to rebuild on a new server. Being unlicensed, have to convert from physical to virtual, then import into the ESX environment. Takes MUCH more time on these old boxes.. 5 hours not unusual…
There was some question as to whether or not the non-beta version would perform the simple task of resizing a virtual disk, and the answer is YES. I just did this successfully on Workstation 5.5. The option is subtle, you have to pull a dropdown menu when it asks which disks you want to convert. The downside is that it deletes all your snapshots (as the author pointed out in his original post).