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Converting a Physical server to Virtual Server
Are there any tools which can convert my current physical server to virtual machine ?
Its all windows operating systems( 2003/2008/XP)
Any cons in the process. ?
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VMware vCenter Converter can run on a wide variety of hardware, and supports most commonly used versions of the Microsoft Windows and Linux operating systems
ASKER
Is there a full featured trial version ?
The VMware converter is free. No need for a trial version.
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Any hurdles which I need to be aware of when converting a physical to VM ?
Lets say I have a physical PC (windows 2003) on a old hardware (OS on one disk and data on another disk- internally it may or may not be raided)
Now the above physical server I wanted to use VMware converter and move it to another new hardware box as Virtual guest operating system.
ASKER
Continued........
I mean in terms of underlying hardware does the virtual server should match the specs on Physical Server.
It's likely that the P2V conversion, because it cannot determine the difference between physical and hyperthreading, or cores, it will try and allocate a vCPU per discovered CPU. So often the converted VM could have 4 vCPU, and it will allocate 7808MB of memory, because that was available on the physical host.
Also as part of the conversion you have the choice, to change the disk sizes, I would recommend starting out with smaller virtual disk sizes, it's easy to expand, but more difficult to shrink.
In a virtual world, we can be more granular, and adjust vCPU, Memory, and Storage size to suit.
Again, start with 1 vCPU, and lower memory, and add more if required.
Also as part of the conversion you have the choice, to change the disk sizes, I would recommend starting out with smaller virtual disk sizes, it's easy to expand, but more difficult to shrink.
In a virtual world, we can be more granular, and adjust vCPU, Memory, and Storage size to suit.
Again, start with 1 vCPU, and lower memory, and add more if required.
ASKER
How does people take care of this in a real world:
Lets say we have old server with 2 xeon processors ( 2.6Ghz) with 4 GB memory.
Now when we move to a VM box.
How many cores cpu and memory you allocate on VM Host machine for this VM client machine ? based on what the full Physical hardware specs ? or just being granular and give 2 cores and 4 GB first and increase the CPU cores slowly ?
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Agreeing with Hanccocka on, (following up on my previous post). In our real world P2V of our enviroment, we P2V'd all our machines, reduce them to 1 CPU and added the same amount of RAM the physical machine had. Over time, we increased diskspace, CPU's as required.
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Thanks