FOAK: VMWare - creating a VM from a running machine

Some time ago I remember VMWare released a tool that you could run on an
existing machine, and it would create a VM of that machine.

Now my Google mojo has deserted me and the ravaged corners of my memory
are empty. A search of the VMware site is fruitless.

Anyone?

 

VMware Converter.

http://www.vmware.com/products/converter/

HTH

 

Converter rocks. It works more often than not, which quite amazes me.

 

Wow, nice.

 

Using the patented Mavis Beacon "Hunt&Peck" Technique, ginge

That's the badger! Thanks.

It did. You should feel good about yourself, helping the elderly and
infirm like that.

 

Using the patented Mavis Beacon "Hunt&Peck" Technique, Mark Olson

It is, thanks!

 

It is quite remarkable, to be sure.

--
Catman MIB#14 SKoGA#6 TEAR#4 BOTAFOF#38 Apostle#21 COSOC#3
Tyger, Tyger Burning Bright (Remove rust to reply)
116 Giulietta 3.0l Sprint 1.7 GTV TS 156 V6 2.5 S2
Triumph Sprint ST 1050: It's blue, see.
www.cuore-sportivo.co.uk

 

<reads>
Good lord that's incredibly cool and not a little impressive

Our image enabled oncology EMR system is currently refusing to run stably
for a full day, though it freezes for only brief periods. It is a large
application suite and a very large SQL Server dB. Extensive monitoring on
the application, database, hardware and network have been inconclusive.
Pointers at best and by last week we had improved and updated the
application etc as much as is available or practical.

I'm left thinking that there is an obscure and nigh impossible to diagnose
hardware issue on the server or that the application has a weakness that the
few centres of similar size (overseas) have masked with much more powerful
hardware. So somehow we may have to move to a 2008 64bit environment with N
processors. But the patient volumes are such that the services must run 5
days a week without fail.

So suddenly a VM environment comes to mind. I wonder how difficult it is to
migrate a service into a parallel VM environment, migrate an image to
different hardware, test then possibly reverse back out to straight OS mode.

 

'Hog wrote:

It's an old trick, but it might just work

--
Catman MIB#14 SKoGA#6 TEAR#4 BOTAFOF#38 Apostle#21 COSOC#3
Tyger, Tyger Burning Bright (Remove rust to reply)
116 Giulietta 3.0l Sprint 1.7 GTV TS 156 V6 2.5 S2
Triumph Sprint ST 1050: It's blue, see.
www.cuore-sportivo.co.uk

 

Not difficult at all - I've been involved with a project that's done
loads of that sort of thing lately.

 

I would have thought once it's a Virtual machine, leave it there.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/31/microsoft_hyperv_download/

All the VMware guys will throw their hands up in horror but I've used
the Microsoft Hyper-V. It's fairly simple to setup and use with the full
GUI install. If you've already forked out for a Windows 2008 server
license for your 64 bit kit then it's an easy option.

Saying that VMware ESXi is free and does do away with the parent host OS.
http://www.vmware.com/products/esxi/
Usual marketing ploy of having to pay for the really useful features
does apply though !

 

Oh, it works. It's dog slow, though, and still (since it's basically
Windows) likes the host restarting every now and then.

ESXi free is a bit of a PITA - the hardware compatibility is limited, and
(for what we use it for) the big drawback is lack of flexibility to run
monitoring agents/VM snapshotting/backup tools/etc on the host hardware.

Which is why we've stuck with "full fat" host OS (some Windows, some
Linux) and VMWare Server.

 

Which is why the smart guys run it on Server Core.
--
Gavin.

GSXR600K1
Twitter: http://twitter.com/gavin_wilby
Blog: http://www.stoof.co.uk

 

I'm a bit behind with this one. I've come across plenty mentions of
VMWare but never actually tried it.
Will this enable me to load Linux (Ubuntu, for example) on my PC, and
load in a VMWare image of my current XP setup on top of it? From what I
see, any viral infections and software faults are simply dealt with by
reloading the VMWare image. Is there anything to be gained by this,
apart from that? Iow, would I see a net gain in performance by the
system being built on Linux, or is there a processing penalty to be paid
that would effectively result in a slower PC?
Also, it occurs to me that a machine upgrade would be incredibly easy,
if this VMWare isn't hardware-dependent.