I’m a bit confused about VMware’s Converter and when you can use it. Which offering is free? Which is paid? From the last time I looked, I think you need the enterprise product to do an offline conversion. And call me old school, but online conversion just seems like voodoo to me. I was in the office this weekend, trying to convert an important physical machine to a virtual one and it failed for all sorts of reasons:
1. SSH keys. If you have a heavily locked down machine with ssh key logins, you cannot use the online converter.
2. Network. If you can’t hit the ‘source’ machine with ssh, you can’t convert it. Maybe it’s on another network, or has a firewall running on it.
3. So since all that didn’t work, you’re forced to install the converter on the same machine you are converting. Except you don’t want to do that because you will have to fill out lots of forms because you are installing a new piece of software on a production machine.
This is a fail safe method of converting a physical Linux server into a virtual one. I converted my physical machine to an ESX 4.0 host, but this method would probably work for other versions of VMware as well.
1. Power down the server.
2. Boot up the server using a linux live cd . (I like Slax)
3. At the command line, run:
dd if=/dev/sda | ssh user@server 'dd of=sda.img'
Where server is a (linux) server with about twice as much disk space as you have, and /dev/sda is the address of the disk you would like to convert. You could probably do more that one disk using this howto, but I only did one.
4. Install Qemu on the Linux server. You should be able to find it in your yum repo, or apt-get repo.
5. Run this to convert the raw dd image to a vmdk.
qemu-img convert sda.img -O vmdk sda.vmdk
6. Copy the sda.vmdk to your datastore, using scp if you have ssh enabled on your VMware host, or using the Datastore browser if you don’t. Make sure to create a folder for the new machine.
7. Create a new VM in the vSphere Console, using values similar to the physical machine you are replacing. Make sure to select Custom at the first screen, not typical.
8. When it comes time to create a new disk, point vSphere at your newly converted vmdk file.
9. Boot up the server, and you’re done!