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Support We have several virtualisation host servers here in the office, XEN and VMware being the main two. As we do considerable testing, rebuilds, etc. We often move the virtual machines about between host servers. Typically we will move between ESX servers.
Recently we needed to move a virtual test server (VM) from a XEN host server, and decided to move it across to VMware ESX 3 (VI3) server we knew was under utilised.
We decided to use the VMware Converter software tool to do this and what follows is a brief description of how it went.
VMware Converter comes in two formats, as a bootable CD or as a Windows executable. The bootable CD allows you to move a machine without making any changes to system, whilst the EXE version requires you to install the software within the Windows on the VM first.
We went with the EXE version, mainly for convenience, after clicking the install exe the software installs like any other Windows application.
You then start the installed converter software with a double-click.
Click the IMPORT MACHINE button to start the wizard.
You’ll be prompted for the source type (local machine) and login (again local). Choose the drives you’d like to take with you.
Next, you choose your destination. This is either to ESX direct, or in our case the VMC server. At this stage we had to select the cluster, ESX host server and finally the datastore, where you’d like the VMDK etc. to reside.
You then need to select which network interfaces within VMware you want to associate with the NICs on the machine you are importing/converting/migrating.
Finally, decide it you want to install the VMware tools. We said yes to this, which is important later on, see gotcha 2.
VMware Converter now starts working, creating a VM on the ESX server and importing the machine. This took 10m 59s in our case, but admittedly it was pretty simple Windows 2003 server with only one Java application installed.
Once this process is complete you’ll be asked if you want to start the VM. I said no, shutdown the original server VM on the Xen server and then started the new VM on the ESX server.
Here is the first “Gotcha”. Our original server was a W2K3 server on a Xen host. Why does this matter, because the server defaulted to booting in “PV-ENABLED” mode. Which dies on ESX, this is because “PV-ENABLED” mode uses XEN drivers, etc. to support hardware based virtualisation using VT chips and the like, which are not supported in VMware obviously.
So we needed to manually select the non “PV-ENABLED” mode via the VMware console.
Gotcha 2 is that we told VMware converter to install the VMware tools into the new VM, which requires a reboot. So we had just managed to login and were working towards changing the boot options and the server restarted.
Once we rebooted (manually choosing non “PV-ENABLED” mode again) we logged in and changed the boot options by right clicking on the machine, choosing properties, clicking advanced, then settings under Startup & Recovery.
Change the default operating system away from the entry with “PV-ENABLED” in it. Click OK a couple of times and it’s done.
Pretty painless really.
References:
Editing boot.ini Windows 2003
VMware Converter
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