Online Converting

The best thing when virtualizing is of course to make a new virtual machine from scratch. However, time is money, and there is all kinds of configurations of servers out there, some are documented, some arent.

It is a good thing that you then are able to convert an existing physical server to virtual. You will get better performance and a more stable enviroment.

There are 3 ways to convert a physical machine, to make a ghost image and import it to vmware, make an online import with vmware converter and and offline conversion with vmware importer coldclone iso.

Mostly I use the online method, most servers that we have are application servers, that is, they are quite static. SQL servers we usually use to make new servers of, or move the database to our SQL hotel. There is also a license matter there, expecially for oracle.
Offline conversion is done on servers that are more dynamic or it is an DMZ server.

When doing an online conversion we do it in the following steps:

1. Make sure that you can login on the server that you should convert, and make sure you can do it with no network connected. (Cached AD Login works fine) . Also make sure that you have the network that the physical machine are using VLan:ed to the VMware enviroment.

2. Start importing (Mostly from vsphere "Import Machine" ) uncheck the option to install vmware tools and only choose to connect one network card.

3. When it is done, edit the virtual machine settings, deleting USB hubs, serial ports and deleting the network card and adding a new (VMXNET 3), usually don't edit the number of CPU settings, at least not from many to one single. also add a cdrom drive.

4. Boot up the virtual copy without network connected, log in and wait for the devices to be found.

5. Install vmware Tools and reboot.

6. Uninstall all hardware specific programs for the old hardware.

7. Start a command prompt and type "set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1" and then sevmgmt.msc to start device manager.

8. Choose "Show hidden devices" in device manager and delet all the greyed out devices.

9. Set the network settings as they are in the physical machine, reboot the machine and make sure everything looks fine in the event viewer (Except the errors thats because youre not connected to a network).

10. Connect to the console of the physical machine (With ILO, Drac or any other tool),choose the network settings and select to disable the network. When it is disabled, you enable the network card on the converted virtual machine in the settings.

Voila!
You have successfully converted a server with a downtime of about 2-5 seconds.