Archive for the ‘P2V’ Category

Well, for me this is a blast from the past. Many, Many, Many years ago I was in the number one slot of the VMTN Forum Board for P2V. Back then there was no “converter” instead there was a boot CD and wizard – and the product wasn’t free and called VMware P2V 2.0.

Anyway, back then I was really interested in scripting the post-clean-up phase, and wrote a big long guide to the product, and gave out samples of my scripts.

Well, this work has been picked up by fellow blogger – and I gave the full rights to take those scripts, and rework them for an article. It’s all for the good of community, and about sharing knowledge in my book. You can read about it here, and the article is written by Luciano Patrão….

In this article, we eschew the normal blue-sky 2010 technology predictions for something a bit more everyday that will affect your daily virtual life.

Scale up, up, up and away
Firstly, it’s no surprise that by mid-year there is likely to be a major rerelease of vSphere4 with a strong emphasis on increased scalability. Building on top of vSphere4′s current scalability I wouldn’t be surprised to see the number of vCPUs a single ESX host can support go beyond the 128 core range. I think it’s likely that by the end of 2010 or the beginning of 2011 we will be looking at more than 8 vCPUs to a VM – with VMware pushing the amount of RAM per-VM into the 512 GB to 1 TB range and the ESX host supporting 1 TB or 2 TB of physical RAM.

Read on…

Now, I’m not sure how people will react to wanting to view Steve’s Virtual Black Hole it all sounds quite intrusive to the extent you would need to be qualified doctor. But its well worth a visit. Especially for Steve’s article on “Where to download VMware Cold Clone“. I was once (OK, for a nano-second) at the top of the VMTN forum boards for P2V back when it was called P2V and not this girly “Converter” thing (Only joking). It’s a funny one VMware Converter. I learned last week, that although v4 does NOT support the hot-clone of NT4SP6 – the previous version (that would be v3 then) does. Steve points out that the older (some would say more reliable/dependable) cold-clone .ISO is still about – it your prepared to go hunting about for it. Does VMware care about VMware Converter anymore… or is it looking forward to the day where P2V was a dim and distant memory?

Additionally, Steve has good old debate about that old chestnut about how to partition up ESX – which is especially more pertinent now the Service Console uses a virtual disk. To be honest I’ve never really been 100% sure what the benefits are of a virtual disk for the Service Console. There must be some – just can’t think of them right now…

http://www.thevirtualblackhole.com/uncategorized/vsphere-service-console-partitioning

Simon of autonation.com has very kindly sent RTFM a handy little script – based on some post-P2V scripting I did donkey’s years ago – I’m mean back in the ESX2/VC1/P2V2 era. Here’s the problem it fixes. When you P2V you loose your IP settings from your Windows “Local Area Connection”, because Windows hides the old physical NIC, and shows a new vmxnet NIC inside the virtual machine.

Here’s what Simon’s script does. You run it on the physical box prior to conversion, it reads the IP configuration and pipes it to a text file. You then carry out your P2V. Once that’s completed you re-run the script which then reads your “lost” IP configuration from the text file – and puts them back behind you new local area connection.

If you interested in Simon script you can see it here

According VMware Converter 3.0.1 contains bug fixes and new features including import of VMware Consolidated Backup images, import of certain StorageCraft ShadowProtect images, and an experimental command line interface for migrations.

Link:

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

OK, nothing to do with VMware or Virtualization. My girlfriends daughter put me onto this great song. Something to think about for us all I think

You Tube Video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjtTGdhgjZY 

Lyrics to the Song:
http://www.onlylyrics.com/song.php?id=27623

Eric Sloof (a new VMware Certified Instructor) has written a useful little “jumpstart” the new VMware Convertor product released last week

VMware Converter is the next-generation enterprise-class migration tool that lets you convert physical machines, virtual machines and other disk image formats to VMware virtual machines. It was offically released today.

VMware Converter is available in two editions, Starter and Enterprise. VMware Converter Starter is a free download available to everyone. It is an easy to use product for single conversions. VMware Converter Enterprise is available at no additional cost to existing and new VirtualCenter Management Server customers and P2V Assistant customers, with valid support and subscription contracts.

Link:

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

Free Edition of Conversion Tool to Be Offered at General Availability

This week I learned of a new P2V tool. It’s called ezp2v – it still in development but looks good. Me and Chrus Huss hope to work with this guy – perhaps even consolidatig ezp2v with UlitimateP2V… something like RealllllyEzzzzyUltimateP2V. Catchy or wot?

Check this guy out:

Link:

http://www.ezp2v.net