@pete-s said in P2V conversion:

@wls-itguy said in P2V conversion:

I have two physical servers that would take a great deal of time to rebuild to virtual so a conversion from P2V would be ideal. What are you guys using to do P2V conversions?

I was looking for VMWare's converter but I don't think it exists anymore.

It's better to just reinstall on a new Windows (I'm guessing) and do whatever upgrades that are needed at the same time.

P2V is not a good generic solution. Consider it for quick and dirty band-aid solutions only.

Totally agree. Use migration time as a good time to run side by side and migrate the app and update / cleanup with a fresh install. If you have good procedures, this will be trivial. If you don't, even better, this is a chance to catch gaps in the knowledge base.

@stuartjordan said in Convert Between Popular VM Formats for Free with StarWind:

Looks good though if it does all. I assume it's a windows based product though?

IIRC, yes you have to install it on a Windows system and then connect to the hypervisor in question to create / export the VM you're wanting to convert.

It's been a while since I've last had to convert anything.

Reporting back: The only tool that I had success with was https://relax-and-recover.org/
F33 desktop is now p2v'd.

I already had Disk2vhd downloaded. I posted while CloneZilla was making an image of the entire disk.

The vhdx is made. Now just to wait for the thing to upload to the server and test it out.

@black3dynamite said in Converting VMware VMs to KVM:

I haven't been keeping up with Windows Admin Center for awhile. Was that an option to manage Hyper-V?

It will be, but I'm not sure that it is yet. We've tried and not been able to get it working even internally anywhere, let alone externally. Once they figure out stability and authentication, I assume that it will be great for that. Being that this is 2016, it's going to suck hard. And if there is a Hyper-V issue, WAC would be down which is a problem in a small environment like this.

@scottalanmiller said in P2V Windows 2000 on KVM:

So this is ridiculous, but we just found out that it is actually 2003 R2, not 2000. So I assume that this will be way better.

I had a ton of issues getting mine to work - I had to run chkdsk like 15 times before it finally booted... I don't recall what migration tool I used.

@thwr Disk 2VHD always helps us in such cases. Here is the nice step-by-step guide on how to use it. Hope it helps. https://www.veeam.com/blog/how-to-convert-physical-machine-hyper-v-virtual-machine-disk2vhd.html

@Kelly yeah the HC3 Move (powered by Double-Take) is certainly easier and more direct...

if the xenserver export virtual disk file is a VHD file, you can probably skip converting it to qcow2 but simply renaming the file to match the guid of the exported empty qcow2 file (so it will still be named <guid>.qcow2 even though it's actually your VHD file.) Our import is actually using the qemu-img convert tool which will automagically detect that it's really a VHD format and do the conversion at the same time it imports it to save that extra step. (and also you can use that same "import shell" over and over... just keep replacing the guid.qcow2 file with the one you want to import)

Considering the solution - I have been thinking for several days that perhaps this issue stemmed from a problem with the disk on the original system. It might be slightly damaged - somehow not enough to prevent it from booting, but enough to cause the seen issues in the clonezilla image.

If I cared, I could run chkdsk /r on the system a few times, then take a clonezilla image again, and then try restoring that.

meh.

@hobbit666 said in P2V Windows 2008 R2:

I'm sure I've used something like Acronis Backup and Restore in the past for trouble machines, when restore they have a "dissimilar hardware" option.

Right - I was using the tools I had available at the time. XenConvert hasn't been officially supported since VS 6.2 or earlier.

I did solve the problem though - one that seemed pretty common - though as @hobbit666 mentioned - third party utilities apparently do often help resolve these problems sometimes.

How goes your project?

How did this go?