studioj
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Migrating additional physical disks to existing virtual machine
I was having difficulty using VMware standalong converter to migrate a physical machine running Ubuntu Linux to an HP DL380 G5 virtual server. The conversion always failed during disk initialization and in the end I concluded that it was because the volumes were large and the log indicated that the initialization and format of the new virtual disks exceeded the 3600 second time limit. I tried editing the disk conversion settings, making the disks 'thin', forcing sector copies etc. and nothing seemed to help. So I decided to try to do the conversion in pieces. I successfully created my virtual machine with the OS and / partition, but now I need to add the other two (large) volumes from the virtual machine. I am using the free Vsphere software... so solutions that include buying a $5000 module from VMware aren't very helpful. Summary - I now have my target VMware virtual machine, what I want to do is migrate two existing physical volumes to my new virtual machine... how do I do that? (the physical volumes are 300gb and 900gb raid 6 arrays)
EvertG
What about using good old rsync ?
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Make new disks, attach to the vm, use whatever to copy the files. Scp, rsync, etc...
ASKER
OK. I should have added one other piece of information as the fact that I used the word Linux probably implied that I'm a Korn Shell god... I'm a windows guy and got stuck with the job of migrating this Linux box. I know enough about Linux to be dangerous, that's about it. If I use rsync, I'm just as likely to blow the bits of my disk off into oblivion as I am to migrating the disk to its new home ;-) It seems to me that somehow the process has to include creating the target on the virtual machine and then copying the volume to the target. It seems like this is something that should be part of the VMWare converter but apparently that software only wants to make new machines, not add resources to existing ones.
Use Disk Imaging you cannot go wrong with a disk image.