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90 Comments
- leobaby, on 10/12/2007, -2/+25Note: Windows will see this as new hardware and will want to reactivate.
- teh_toaster, on 10/12/2007, -0/+17Linkage for VMware Converter: http://download3.vmware.com/software/converter/VMware-p2v-3.0.0-36853.exe
- Kniggit, on 10/12/2007, -0/+12Is there any utility that will go the OTHER way (i.e. from virtual machine to actual installation on a bootable partition)?
- rudy23, on 10/12/2007, -0/+12I used this software recently and it seriously is a very mature product with lots of customization options available. Not once did I have to do anything than use the GUI to make the choices.
Great work by the folks at vmware. - spiderland, on 10/12/2007, -6/+17@masterboy27:
No one will read your comment because you're being dugg down for spam. You might want to consider not doing this in the future. - Double-Z, on 10/12/2007, -5/+14I agree about the spam. Just don't do it.
- technerdy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7I can't wait to try this for servers that I want to wipe clean/re-install. Backups never work correctly in terms of restoring startup services or registries
Does anyone have any numbers on how long it takes? Does the VMWare image get created on the machine or can you save it somewhere else if the machine doesn't have enough space. - aliengoods, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7I can. If you have ESX server and VMotion with 2 or more servers (physical) running, you have an incredibly fault tolerant system. I use it at work for a number of mission critical apps and haven't had any problem.
Please note: mission critical doesn't mean they're servers which are using a great deal of processing power. If you have a box thats continuously running at 75% CPU utilization or higher, you want dedicated machines, not virtual machines. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6now i wish you could go the other way around with this. that would be sweet.
(if you can, i completely missed it. at work and can't read it all.) - SgtBeavis, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6I'll see your 30 ESX servers and raise you a few more ;-)
I designed our environment from the ground up. Instead of blades, we are running a dev environment on DL580 G3's with 16GB of RAM each. They've been good for up to 20VMs each. The production environment runs DL585 G3 (dual core AMD) with 32GB or ram each. One of these servers is running 40 VMs in production. I haven't had one outtage yet. Everything is on Clarrion.
Last week we stood up our new VI3 environment on its own SAN storage group. I've just got 5 VMs running, but one has 8GB and 4 vCPUs running a SQL 2005 DB on 64bit Win2k3 R2.
Virtualization is going to change the datacenter work (oh wait it already has). - RichGC, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Was given a demonstration of this recently at work: http://www.platespin.com/
Its not free, but if your looking for a corporate solution, it does physical to virtual and virtual back physical ( plus other stuff like incremental physical to virtual backups, so if your real server fails, you can quickly boot up a vmware image of it until you get the problem sorted. ) - xzitony, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7if you're running vmware, you're probalby not running OEM or retail windows, and ofcourse windows only has activation in OEM and retail versions... but you already knew that.
- pcgeek101, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5"Note: Windows will see this as new hardware and will want to reactivate."
Not for VLK licensed products - rudy23, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5They have a very flexible mechanism.
1. You need a ESX host which runs the virtual machines
2. on the machine to be cloned you run a software which will start creating an image in realtime and transfer it directly to the ESX host. So the cloned machine doesn't need space for its own image at all.
Its that simple with the new version. in addition to that you can as you said store the image locally or remotely for manual transfer or backup purposes.
You might also want to check on their live replication feature where you can have backup VM's running in a hot standby mode. - 13thfloor, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Block him and all of the related comments go away too. This will be the last I see of this...
- rudy23, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4For those who would like to try ESX you can sign up for VMTN which is like $200 per year and you can use all their products in a development environment for free.
- Trention, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4ESX is really overkill for most people, though.
- SgtBeavis, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4See Platespin PowerConvert. It does P2V, P2I, I2V, V2I, V2P, P2P... you get the picture....
The problem is that PowerConvert is expensive.
VMware converter serves one purpose, turning physical servers into virtual machines for the purpose of server consolidation, power conservation, infrastucture savings. Man I could go on but I think you get it. - aliengoods, on 10/12/2007, -5/+9spam == blocked
- SgtBeavis, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3No, you cannot just use ghost and restore to a physical server. It doesn't work that way.
You need another converter like PlateSpin PowerConvert or HP Insight's Server Migration Pack. There are a few other products out there that can do it as well. - Double-Z, on 10/12/2007, -3/+6So, the people digging me down for my comment above want people to spam comments here?
*sigh* - SgtBeavis, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3It all depends.
On the datacenter end, virtualization serves as a fantastic cost cutting tool because most physical servers are vastly under utilized. If you can take 20 under utilized systems and virtualize them under one physical server, the savings can be huge.
From the desktop, however, virtualization has other great uses. It can be set up as a development testing machine for testing new applications. If the application ruins your machine, you can just reboot it back to its original state (assuming you set your disk to non persistent mode)
You can also use VMs as "Virtual Appliances" VMware.com has several free virtual appliances to use for things like Firewalls, spam filters, and web browsers. If you use a virtual appliance as a web browser, you can pretty much guarantee that you will never get spyware/malware on your hosting PC. The free web browsing virtual appliance at VMware.com is based on Ubuntu, so you can leave your host machines resources fairly low and still have decent performance.
I have an XP VM that I use for downloading applications and other items from the web. I install them on the VM before I try to use them on the host operating system. If there are any viruses/malware/spyware on the application, they will ruin the virtual machine, while my host PC remains clean. - nirav72, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Common uses of virtual machine. Here's 3 I can think of quickly.
1> You could run multiple operating systems on one box. Example, your primary OS is windows , but you want to tinker around with linux. You could create a linux vmware image and load it whenever you wish without rebooting your primary OS.
2> You're a developer and you want to emulate a server environment. (e.g win2003k or linux server). You could create a vmware image of that server installation.
3> You're a developer and need to test cross platform apps - Java or maybe even a web application over different types of browsers. you could have vmware images of the various operating systems.
thats just 3 examples. There are a lot more possibilities. Even for home users. - dac74, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3@Rudy23,
Your way off man. we have a 30 ESX server farm. running everything from citrix to sql to oracle to peoplesoft apps to web servers to file and print and on and on and on. All of our esx servers are on HP bl20p G4 with 14GB of ram and 2 xeon 2.3ghz duel core procs. Storage is provided by a EMC clarrion and a DMX. We run about 12 guests per host and with a ESX enterprise license just over 4 grand, makes VMware ESX an absolutely amazing product. By the way, thats only 2 standard racks full of blades. - SgtBeavis, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3This isn't about a workstation product. VMware converter is for server end products like VMWare ESX where you can run up to 200 virtual machines on one physical server. (200 VMs is the limit for ESX 3.0.1)
- rudy23, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3The great part is that it doesn't force you to keep the same disk size. say you have 100 gigs of space and 50 gigs used. you could create a new VM with just 60 gigs and have only 10 gigs free in it.
- kickarse, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Could take anywhere from 30 minutes to 12 hours... depends on the amount of data...
- bakeyman, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4I've used that for production machines in my environment along with VMWare Virtual Machine Importer to go from physical to virtual on ESX 3.0.1 for free. Works great!
http://www.vmware.com/products/vmimporter/ - ashmoore1, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3You seem to suppose that VM Workstation cannot boot from a real disk.
The digg was for a converter that converts to ALL of VMs product line, not some workstation only virtual machine product.
Compared to VMServer, VMPlayer and the featured product (VM Converter) which version of Parallels is free? I don't mean trials. - polymorphist, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Check this out
http://www.moka5.com/node/34 - dogred, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2couldn't you "ghost" an image of the virtual hard drive, then apply that image to a real server? never done it, but it might work.
- polymorphist, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Is there a way to do the reverse (i.e. from VM to PC)
- xxrazor, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Still waiting for a Mac OS X *real machine* to VMware image converter
- bigtallmofo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2@rudy23
Any loss of performance due to running under VMWare ESX on a production system is more than made up for in the lessened downtime when moving that server to a disaster recovery center or to other hardware. ESX with VMotion as other people have stated is made for production systems, even for workhorse servers like database servers that might have a 1 to 1 relationship of physical to virtual. - dagr8tim, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I just got an email at work this morning to explore this program. So far I'm impressed. Alot easier than replicating sysprepped base install files to create new virtual machines,
Plus you can import norton ghost backup's or MS's Virtual PC installs to create new machines in VMware. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Any one got a vm of BeOS???
- ubica, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Is there any utility that will go the OTHER way (i.e. from virtual machine to actual installation on a bootable partition)?
last time i some how screwed the host OS partition when running vmware on same disk but different partition. - SgtBeavis, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Can be used on VMPlayer (free), VMServer (free), VMware Workstation ($$$) or VMware ESX (empty your savings or rob a bank) ;-)
All three use the same VMDK file format for virtual disks. - tacojohn48, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2fta - from the article
- code_of_life, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2"Supports conversion of third-party disk image formats such as Microsoft Virtual PC, Microsoft Virtual Server, Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery, and Norton Ghost 9 (or higher). "
no DriveImageXML support :( - cortfr, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Can the VMs be used in VMWare Player (free) or do you have to buy the server?
- seandfeeney, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3When EMC bought VMWare has got to be one of the best buisness moves the company i work for ever made. Well... that and buying RSA. VMWare is way better than any other. Just wait till what EMC has in store for the future.
- AtomB, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I would love to use it to clone an OS X disk into a VM but I have a feeling that wouldn't work at this point.
- CygnusXII, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Once you go Virtual, the uses are never ending. I use Virtual PCs' for a ton of things besides Server Migration and duplication.
One of the handiest uses is VMs' for application compartmentalization. Use graphics a lot, but don't want to tie the apps
to the machine, then install them to a virt. Need a dedicated PC for App Dev, set up a VM with all the Programming software
you want. Burn em to a DVD and Bob's your Uncle, when ya need the Environment, there it is. - BobbyOnions, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1> well, it didn't work and there
> was very little support.
I agree. I've tried it about 10 times and it failed on about 4 of those attempts - no explanation.
It seems to work best with Joe Bloggs IDE controllers, no RAID and no Exchange server.
I last tried it on January 5th - while it was still in beta, admittedly - on a Dell Poweredge. Took HOURS and didn't complete, wasted a whole afternoon which I couldn't bill the client for :( - inf1ni, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Okay so if you can backup a physical machine to a virtual machine... is there a way to do the inverse?
- PRlME, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1DriveImageXML runs on Vista?
- mikedoth, on 05/20/2008, -0/+1http://haiku-os.org
- ideefix, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1unable to install, service ufad-p2v failed to start.
some suggestions? - beerorkid, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I only have had one problem with it. I was not able to do it with a domain controller since there is no way to log in as a local admin. That was a previous version though.
Really neat that they provide really good support for a free product. -
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