Craig Pringle walks us through some steps of using VMware Converter, now in beta, wih very nice screen shots. Craig Pringle – Converting a Physical Machine to a Virtual Machine.
After that I installed VMWare Converter onto a Windows 2003 Server that is alreadly running VMWare Server. After installing I launched VMWare converter. Basically from there I just clicked on Import Machine button and followed my nose.
Don’t know about Converter? Here’s a few more links:
- Download Squad: VMware Converter: Turn your computer into a virtual machine
- Friends in Tech: VMware Converter Beta
- 4sysops.com: Resize a virtual disk with VMware Converter
- baeke.info: VMware Converter Beta. Geert Baeke takes Converter through its paces, and has a few things to watch out for:
First of all, make sure you have name resolution correctly configured so that the name of your target ESX server can be resolved to an IP address. That should not be an issue in a production environment but in a test environment, that is easily overlooked (as I did). I also had an issue with the imaging process itself. Apparently, VMware Converter uses Volume Shadow Copy services on operating systems that support it. On my test source machine, these services were disabled and naturally, the imaging process failed. After starting the Volume Shadow Copy service and the MS Software Shadow Copy Provider services everything worked like a charm.
