I couldn't sleep tonight so I thought that a quick article on my P2V process for windows servers might help others and cure my insomnia. While there is a great P2V product available for free at RTFM called Ultimate-P2V, I will write about the process that I use with VMWare's commercial product. There are also other products on the market available from different vendors including hardware manufacturers but that is also out of scope for my braindump tonight. Some of the products, especially the ones from the hardware vendors are just a point and click process that don't require a lot of the manual tweaking.

This is just a basic guide, not an in depth step by step guide. It should be enough to get you through the process and let you learn something on the way. You will not learn anything if you just click according to a document! If people show interest in the articles I write then I will definately expand upon them and create those detailed documents.

The P2V process is the process of turning a physical box into a virtual box. Whether you are using VMWare for test, dev or production, chances are you will have to consolidate more than one server from a physical server onto a virtual host.

The first thing that I do is take an image of the server. For this process acronis true image is my weapon of choice, you can use another imaging program like ghost if you wish. I normally take the image to a network location, but you can place the image file on your p2vhelper machine which is described below.

This is the part of the p2v process where you can make your life a little easier. Build yourself a virtual machine, I like to call it my p2v helper. This machine should have your imaging program of choice installed and p2v installed. It should also have access to storage space that is large enough to host both the p2v helper machine and the machine that you are trying to virtualise.

Shut down your p2v helper machine and create a new virtual disk. Make sure the virtual disk has enough space to accomodate the restore of the image you took earlier. Start your p2v helper machine and restore the image from the network location to the new virtual disk.

Fire up VMWare p2v on the p2v helper machine and point it at the restored partition. If p2v cannot detect the operating system, then 9 times out of 10 it is due to an incorrect boot.ini configuration. If you don't understand what I am talking about, go here. Run p2v over the restored partition, this part is straightforward and you will should breeze through it.

Once the p2v has been completed, shut down the p2v helper machine and detach the virtual disk that you restored the image to. At this step, I like to rename our new VMDK file to reflect the new name of the p2v'd server as by default it will assume the name of the P2V helper machine. My weapon of choice for this one is WinSCP, though you can do it both in the MUI and at the service console by putty. Once you have renamed the file then create a new virtual machine, assuming you are using virtual center, select manual. Then tell it you already have an existing virtual disk and point to your p2v'd server.

You should be ok to boot the server now. If the server blue screens it will more than likely because when you restored your image you didn't give it enough free space on the system or boot partition. Once the server has started, install the VMWare tools. Select complete when it prompts, and then reboot. I suggest removing all non present hardware devices as I wrote in this tip. Also uninstall any hardware specific applications like compaq managers, broadcom network card utils and the like. You will also need to go into computer management and configure drive letters for your disk files if they are not correct or not assigned. Remember to configure your nic to get the machine on the network, and check all your services have started and your applications are functioning.

Thats about it, and I will mention one thing that always holds true that I heard someone from VMWare say.

"Don't expect that if a server is running badly that virtualising will fix it. Always remember a poorly configured physical server will be a poorly configured virtual server"

Now to get some sleep or watch some Seinfeld.