While VMware software provides much additional benefits and added values, it is not always easy to migrate existing production machines. The available maintainance time might be very small, especially for the critical production servers. ServiceTech understands that companies will often need help in the whole process - from initial preparation to actual migration and future technical support needs. Also, our consultants can provide recommendations on contingency and fall back procedures.
Accelerated Migration (Physical to Virtual - P2V)
Windows - VMware Converter
VMware, Inc has developed the
VMware Converter products, with a Starter version available as a free download. It has a wizard based user interface, and is targeted for Microsoft Windows operating systems. The Enterprise version can convert physical machines, virtual machines and third-party system images to the VMware platforms.
We have had mixed success with VMware Converter, because of compatibility issues with certain hardware and application configurations. A small fraction of machines failed during the conversion, and some would not boot up after the conversion. And for "cold cloning" with vCenter Converter 3.0, the source machine must have a minimum of 264 MB physical memory. A manual process may be required for the migration.
Linux - Manual Migration
For Linux migration to the VMware platform, ServiceTech has developed a migration procedure for Red Hat and SuSE Linux. We have customized boot disk which can boot up the more popular server hardware. We have prepared the most popular storage and network drivers, and we can transfer the data to the virtual machine directly.
In Gigabit Ethernet environment, we could achieve data transfer rate of around 20-40MB per second depending on the hardware configurations. So for a 146GB hard drive, the migration should normally take around 3-4 hours. It is much faster than traditional tape backup and restore methodology.
We have tested the following driver software and can work with you for your existing IT environment.
Physical: IBM ServeRAID, Adaptec SCSI, Broadcom NetXtreme, Intel Pro 1000.
Virtual - VMware: BusLogic, LSI Logic, Network Drivers (vlance/vmxnet).
Update: VMware has released VMware vCenter Converter 4.0.1 and added Linux support. ServiceTech finds from initial testing that this new version has various improvements, in particular to support VMware vSphere 4 features.
Advanced Services
- Migration from IDE physical disk to SCSI virtual disk
- Expansion or shrink of disk size
