VMWare ESX on Workstation
I needed to do capture an existing physical machine to virtual (P2V) of an old linux box that was getting on in age. I thought that VMWare would be the clear solution to capture this through the VMWare Converter tool. Unfortunately, Converter doesn’t directly support capturing a linux machine.
The solution I found was to create a virtual VMWare ESXi OS install on my VMWare Workstation. This was not very straight forward as ESXi 4.0 is only for 64-bit systems. I found that ESXi 3.5 was 32-bit and decided to give it a try. For some reason the ESXi install would not proceed correctly choosing to throw PANIC errors. Later I realized that it was due to the fact that I did not allocate enough RAM to this machine. The default value was 256MB and the solution was to up that value to over 1GB of RAM. Then, I would get stuck during the installation in the first 10% or so and would just not move on. I found the solution through a youtube video which showed that I need to select an Intel VT option for the processor settings. This allowed me to continue with the installation.
Note: On a Dell Quad-core server I had to enable the hardware Intel VT instructions. Otherwise the installation of ESX may hang.
More to come…
ESXi booted up with some lvm error, but for some reason, I could not get an IP address. Edited my myvmName.vmx file with note pad and added the blow lines.
Check out this video here
monitor_control.restrict_backdoor = “TRUE”
monitor_control.vt32 = “TRUE”
SMBIOS.reflectHost = “TRUE”
ethernet0.VirtualDev = “e1000″
After that I was able to get a DHCP address! In my production environment we use static ip addresses, so for now I had to switch it to use NAT.
Now I can use Converter to capture a base virtual image of my remote physical machine. Make sure to give root remote access rights and use the IP address of your server as the source. For the destination, in a p2V situation using linux we can only use ESXi and so we need to capture to a VMWare Infrastructure virtual machine. The IP address is that of your virtual ESX installation and don’t forget to set a root password, otherwise it will not work.
After the image was transferred, I used converter again to bring it over from the VMWare Infrastructure virtual machine to the VMware Workstation or other VMware virtual machine. This allows me to open the vm from workstation instead of from ESX. At some point I may deploy to an ESX installation but for now I am content to access my linux box from workstation.
