Migrating Physical to Virtual Machines - Then and Now

Back in the stone ages of server virtualization (circa 2001), one of the pain points that I started to deal with was trying to figure out how to migrate one of my physical servers over to a virtual machine.

Picture if you will (sound the music), VMware ESX Server was only a 1.0 release at the time, there were no conversion tools from Leostream or PlateSpin, VMware didn't have a solution available to its customers, Google and Yahoo were practically useless for searching for ANYTHING about server virtualization, and I don't believe anyone had actually coined the phrase "P2V" at that time. It was a lonely time for server virtualization enthusiasts. There were no user groups to speak of, nor were there any communities created to help answer trivial, common, or obscure questions about the products. We were still working on coming up with problems and questions - we didn't have time to congregate and come up with answers yet! And most of the people in the IT community at that time looked at you like you were insane for even using virtualization in a production environment.

And so, we tried to use similar methods that we used on physical servers to move images around. We quickly realized in our Windows dominated data center, you cannot simply Ghost a physical server and expect that image to boot on a virtual machine. Can you say "Blue Screen of Death"? Unfortunately, BSOD became our battle cry as we experimented over and over again trying to perfect what seemed like a simple conversion process.

Fast forward to the present (thank goodness), and we have all kinds of choices: P2V solutions from the virtualization vendors, products being released by traditional imaging software vendors, 3rd-party offerings from virtualization start-up companies specializing in conversion, as well as a number of homegrown solutions.

InfoWorld recently completed a review of two of the leading P2V solutions being offered by 3rd-party manufacturers, PlateSpin and Leostream. Both companies have been at this for a while now, and the products have improved a great deal over time as they have been put through the test of battle.

For some people, packaged P2V solutions come at too great a price, which causes many to come up with homegrown migration solutions of their own, or they download them from the community. One of the more popular solutions in this category is a project dubbed "Ultimate P2V", created by Qui Hong, Chris Huss, and Mike Laverick. Expanding on this project is a newcomer called EZP2V. Both projects make use of a BartPE boot disk and a number of tools and plug-ins to help with the process.

No matter which solution you choose, there is always the chance of a failed migration. Converting a physical machine to a virtual machine is a complex process, even though things have gotten a lot simpler and easier than when I first attempted it many years ago... blind folded with my hands tied behind my back!

I'd love to know, what P2V solution do you currently use? Which products have you used in the past? I'd love to know what worked or hasn't worked for you. I'm always looking for new and interesting tools to make my life easier. And yes, even 5 years later, I've still seen a few machines BSOD after conversion. Help me catch a break!

Posted by David Marshall on July 5, 2006 08:05 PM