11/10/08

P2V NT 4 Servers: What they do not tell you

I spent a portion of this past weekend virtualizing servers on old hardware. How old? Not only do these servers still say Compaq on them instead of HP but they did not have any USB connections, just PS2, CD-ROM, disk drives and wonderful floppy drives.

Prep Servers


Before starting the migration, we needed to prep the servers by copying over the full version of VMWare tools as well as sp6i386.exe to the NT4 servers. We already expected that the converter would ask for the service pack installing the vmware tools prior during the conversion process has not proven to work well.

Cold Boot Method

We have been doing a migration using the "cold boot" method using VMWare's Converter. Since these servers and applications are old, we did not want to chance causing any problems by installing anything. So, we booted with VMWare's Converter bootable CD. Unfortunately, this is as fast as watching cactus grow. It works but painfully slow because the hardware is old and slow but more importantly, the speed of the initial process is greatly affected by the speed of the CD/DVD-ROM.

Discovery Process


The NT4 servers were running Sp6a but beyond that, no updates or hotfixes had been applied to the servers. During the converter process, the application must discover the hardware characteristics of the server including HDs, RAID configuration, NICs, display drivers, etc. This is when the cactus is growing. Eventually, you're prompted to enter the IP address and related network information that will be used during the migration. This IP does not need to be the actual IP address of the physical machine but just an IP address for migration purposes. Since the servers were moving to a different VLAN, our IP address was different than the physical server.

Do not Pass Go, Go directly to Jail

Finally, the moment of truth. To get past the section where the converter verifies that the server has all the minimum service pack and hotfixes is similar to trying to pass the "Go to Jail" square in the board game Monopoly. If you do not succeed, you may have to start over. If the server is missing some key hotfixes, it will prompt you for them. In our case, the servers did not have any USB connections and we did not have any floppy disks with the necessary hotfixes.

Missing What?


When we were prompted for a 2nd hotfix Q811493. Arrgh!! Did you catch that? The converter does not list all of the hotfixes that it wants at one time or at least not in this case. Nooooooooo, that would be to easy. My hopes were high as I rebooted the server for a second time after copying over another hotfix only to be prompted again.

We are approximately 1.5 hours into this P2V exercise between switching cables, reboots and copying software. We all know that Google is our friend, so we search Google for "Q811493 vmware" and plenty of articles lead us to the software to download. Wait a minute, the only download we see is Q811493i.exe. We assume "i" was for the international version and included all the languages. OK, if you say so.

We repeat the steps of rebooting the server to the normal login mode; copy the file Q811493I.exe to a local hard drive just as we did for SP6I386.EXE. No, big deal, right? WRONG!!! After we reboot and "try to pass go", we end up back in jail and not collecting $200. It does not even see our file. Hmmmm.

We return to searching Google to determine if there is another file Uh...not so much. So, we expand the and try again. That resulted in "thanks for playing, please try again".

Pass Go and Collect $200

By now, it's close to 3 hours into this process and my co-worker suggests making a second copy of Q811493i.exe and rename that to just Q811493. Voila!!! The converter wanted the hotfix without the ".exe" extention and without the "i". Go figure?

Afterwards, we were able to P2V (physical to virtual) the server and resize the partitions of the new guest machine. It is these little "gotchas" that they just don't tell you.

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