Convert Windows 2000 Server SP4 running Exchange 2000, and running SQL 2000 with Vmware Converter

P2V with VMware convertor is reasonably straightforward now.

Follow the gui providing source physical machine and destination. Some things to look out for:

-you will need to re-ip the virtual. The virtual nic will not have the ip information of the physical, so write it down and configure when the virtual is up.
-HAL. If you have more than one logical core on the physical you will have more than one vCPU in the virtual. Configure this down to 2 vCPUs unless your vmware box has a serious amount of cores!
-Legacy hardware and software. All that old physical hardware will exist in device manager - clean it out of the virtual. Also if you have some vendor hardware management/diag software it's kind useless in a virtual.

More detailed info in this doc even if it is a bit old:

http://www.rtfm-ed.eu/docs/vmwdocs/admin-p2v-2.0.pdf

I've done P2V before, but it seems to be different with Windows 2000 Server running exchange 2000 and SQL 2000.  I've ran into a problem with it failing with an unknown error and need to know if anyone has successfully created a virtual server of a Windows 2000 server running exchange 2000 and SQL 2000 environment.  If they have then I need to know the process that was taken.  Note:  There are no mirrored drives and also during the virtualization process it shows the two drives I know about.  It is also picking up two unidentified drives that I don't have any clue where it is getting them from.  I do have mapped drives on the server, but the sizes dont match up. When I run it with everything checked I get an unidentified error.  When I run it with the two drives with questions marks unchecked it pops up a warning about it being a system drive and will not boot, but it runs all the way the through.  I'm just unable to boot the image up that it takes because it doesn't find the OS.  This is the only time I've ran into a problem with the converter.  Help please.

I don't suppose you get an error code? I recall a NT4 box I was asked to hot p2v but could not because it was pre sp6...

Anyhow do you have the vmware convertor enterprise edition - because if you did i would consider using the cold boot cd they provide to try the p2v.

I suppose some other questions-
Does the physical box have any issues at the moment?
What does the vmware convertor log say?

I know points are already given for this, but i wanted to add my $0.02.

If you have mail spooling, such as a spam filter or other perimeter e-mail gateway, just unmount the information store and stop all SQL services for the duration of the conversion. Your gateway should spool e-mail long enough for you to do the conversion. I did mine after hours so users didn't see a disruption; it only took about an hour and a half over 1000base-t, even though I have about a 24 GB info store and about another 30 GB in databases. Then I shut down the physical server, brought up the virtual server with the VM nic set to host-only, replicated the IP information to the guest machine's nic, then changed the vm nic to Bridged and rebooted. When it came back up, the spam filter dumped its spooled mail, Outlook worked with no reconfig, sql jobs ran; it was beautiful.

By the way, the ShadowProtect IT is actually made by StorageCraft; the URL is: http://www.storagecraft.com/products/ShadowProtectIT/