VMware P2V - VMotion

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I have recently been retiring most of our hardware based servers by using VMware to convert the physical hardware to virtual. So far it has been going smoothly apart from the odd issues of network card still detecting the previous hardware network interface card, drivers and IP address and prompting to have this resolved before proceeding.

The real challenge as it stands at the moment is that I am trying to P2V one of our server that has two drive paths the C:\ for normal programs and operating system and the other D:\ holding the database for the application on the server.

Both drives are detected when I click on the select drive volumes and the D:\ has a red question mark next to it and seeing the drive as unknown. The C:\ drive is fine without any error markings, hence I ignored the drive that showed up as unknowned and carried on to P2V the machine to virtual.

The install and transfers completes without any errors but once logged onto the finished P2V machine its only showing the C:\ drive. This however, is not good as the server runs an application that needs the drive path that holds the database which is unfortunately on the D:\ that holds the database but didn't get transfered.

I have even ran chkdsk and defrag on the host and re-carried out the above but to no avail and need ideas please.

Thanks in advance.

 

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The drive isn't an iattached drive is it (iscsi, usb etc)?

Next are you doing a warm or cold p2v?

 

Thanks for the feedback Simon, the drive is an internal scsi drive partitioned as c and d, d drive being for data etc.

Sorry not sure about hot or cold install, but installed the converter pluggin on the server and starting the P2V from the host etc.

 

You would need to use the stand alone converter cd and cold boot the server and p2v it that way. It's usually the best way of doing the P2V if something goes wrong.

 

I agree with Simon on this... this is how myself and my colleague P2V'd servers...

 

Yep! we've done these as well just that for some reason our 1GB network connection is slow and takes close to four hours to P2V just one machine.

On the other hand when the host is being converter from the local machine via VMotion it takes just under two hours which is brilliant in comparison to nearly or over four hours.

The project manager is on a tight time frame as she is getting impatient with the slowness of converting the physical machine to virtual etc. So any time that can be saved in this scenario is good news

The network has been scanned using wireshark and the Orion - AKA SolarWinds but not trace of network hogs etc. Well the joys of working in IT I suppose and the forever learning curves

This is the reason we're carrying our the other option of running the converter on a host machine and so far has been fine until this database machine that's for some reason not transfering over the database drive.

Thanks for sharing though, much appreciated but in the main time am running Symantec recovery cloninig software on the host again this time selecting all the displayed volumes.

As soon as the image is complete I would run the converter using the "other" option and poining it to the UNC path of \\server\machinename\host.sv2i image file. This has worked so far for several others that I have P2V'd recently.

I would let you know how it all pans out as soon as it completes. Fingers crossed.

 

The drives were originally dynamic when the P2V was carried out and apparently when complete VMware does not display dynamic drives or volumes.

All I had to do was go into disk management and convert the drives to basic on the VM box and issue resolved with all drives showing as they originally should do.

Well, am still learning and willing to learn some more.