V2V Made Easy

VM image converter (VMDK, VHD, VHDX, IMG, RAW, QCOW and QCOW2), P2V migrator

Moderators: anton (staff), art (staff), Anatoly (staff), Max (staff)

Post Reply
dsimmons@engsin.com
Posts: 12
Joined: Thu Mar 18, 2010 2:05 pm

Thu Mar 18, 2010 2:34 pm

I was a virtual Iron (VI) customer that made the decision to switch to XenServer. I was unable to convert virtual machines from 1 to the other. Something would always fail. Eventually, I figured out a way to convert servers that is mostly painless in a small environment. I think this will work for almost any V2V conversion regardless of vendor.
In my set up, I have a VI Host server running several VM's. On my Xenserver, I have a winxp workstation VM. For this exercise, I was converting an antivirus management server called 'pmp01'

Here's what to do.
1. get a copy of Drive Snapshot.
2. uninstall the VI tools from pmp01.
3. While pmp01 was running, take a snapshot and save it out to the network.
4. while snapshot is running, note what disk drivers name and location that VI has installed to drive the disks (go to hardware manager to do this)
4. attach what will be the new system volume for the xen server version of pmp01 as a second drive to the xp vm that's on the xen server host. The second volume showed up as drive E:
5. restore the snapshot to drive E on the xp vm
6. After the restore, explore over to drive E and rename the VI specific disk drivers noted in step 3. That basically left disk.sys
7. shut down the VI version of pmp01.
8. shut down the xp host on the xenserver
9. detached the E drive from the xp host
10 create a new xenserver vm and set it so the boot volume is the volume we restored the snapshot to
11 boot the new pmp01 server on xen.
12. mission accomplished. Got get a beverage of your choice
Constantin (staff)

Fri Mar 19, 2010 11:50 am

Thank you for feedback!
Post Reply