Physical to virtual machine

Tom Dunne

Can it be done? If so, how?

We have a couple of older development machines (Win 2k and Win 2K3) that are rarely used, but consuming loads of electricity.

So I am thinking of cloning them to virtual machines, so they can be powered on when needed.

(I do realise I can simply power off the physical machines and power them back on when needed, but I reckon this would be an interesting project)

CiaranC

http://www.vmware.com/products/converter/

Platespin have a nice tool too

Jumpy

What Virtual system do you use? VMware?

Dingatron

Good question that. I'm looking at attempting something similar for an old w2k server I have. Need to create a vcd of it and I found makevm http://www.sysdevsoftware.com/soft/makevm.php but haven't looked into it enough yet. What about ghosting it and installing it in a newly created virtual machine? Not sure if that's a runner. I'd be interested to hear peoples experiences.

axer

You can do that with Microsoft's Virtual PC I believe.

_Kaiser_

We did this recently using Microsoft's System Centre suite to migrate a box to Hyper-V under Server 2008.

Went painlessly. Mostly just going through the wizard.

stakey

I'll second Kaiser2000, Hyper-V and SCVMM (System Centre Virtual Machine Manager) will have you consolidating your physicals to virtual very easily.

Tom Dunne

Jumpy wrote: »

What Virtual system do you use? VMware?

MS Virtual Server.

axer wrote: »

You can do that with Microsoft's Virtual PC I believe.

Yeah, eventually found something on that. But your Virtual Server install needs to be on Enterprise Edition of W2K3 or higher. We, cheapskates that we are, are on Standard Edition.

stakey wrote: »

I'll second Kaiser2000, Hyper-V and SCVMM (System Centre Virtual Machine Manager) will have you consolidating your physicals to virtual very easily.

I'll give it a look so, thanks.

BaconZombie

For the 2K box's tried VMWare Converter first since it's free, but if you run into problems Platespin works 99% of the time with not problem but you do have to pay for it.

CiaranC wrote: »

http://www.vmware.com/products/converter/

Platespin have a nice tool too

abakan

Norton ghost has an option to let you convert the drive to a virtual drive so u can load it into VMWare etc

Capt'n Midnight

Add drivers needed for the virtual PC's to the real PC's
Check that the HAL levels are compatible and edit Boot.ini if necessary to point to the appropiate HAL file
Backup the PC's with Ntbackup do a full ASR if possible
install a clean install on windows in the virtual machine with all drivers needed and patch to the same service pack level as the real machines
restore the ntbackup and choose the option to not overwrite newer files

francosp

I use Sun's xVM Virtualbox

http://www.virtualbox.org/

Bit 64

Could be done by:
1) "Snapshot" image of the system (http://www.drivesnapshot.de/en/)
2) Create a new MS Virtual PC;
3) Boot your Virtual PC from a Bart-PE CD and restore an image to the virtual PC;