VMWare vCenter Convertor, convert physical machines to virual machines, FREE
About 6 months ago, I did a series on tutorials on the free VMWare VMServer product that ran and administered virtual machines through a web interface. I got a letter from a gentleman asking how to move his laptop windows XP image to a virtual environment. He was making a Driveimage XML(as a BartPE plug-in) backup and was trying to restore it in a XP virtual machine. This runs into a s-load of abstraction layer problems, that I don’t think it could ever work that way. Here’s a section of my reply to him:
>But that’s all academic, because the real problem
> is that the restored image probably won’t run because the
> “hardware” that windows sees has changed. Just like
> pulling a physical hard drive from one machine and putting
> it in another, Windows won’t probably boot fully, because
> it’s seeing different hardware. Acronis advertises
> that their workstation software can create VM images during
> backup, that would be one way to go. I just saw the
> VMWare has a free converter program http://www.vmware.com/products/converter/
> for creating VM’s, but I only just saw it now while
> researching for your letter, I’ll certainly check that
> out.
I did indeed check it out, and it does work as advertised. It took roughly 20 minutes to produce a VM image folder of my bench XP that I was able to take to my main computer and run under VMserver. Under the first “power on” of the XP image it went through a series of finding and installing drivers then asked for a reboot. After the reboot of the XP image, the environment was fully there as was the installed software from the bench computer; nifty.
Of course, since the hardware has changed, and we all know Microsoft’s douchiness on this subject, the image is giving me 3 days for activation(compared to 30 days for an initial XP install, interesting). I’m not going to bother, since this is a test image I’m going to dump anyway, but I suspect when you go to activate, it’s going to give that magic phone number to call and you get to tell the rep that you’re upgrading the motherboard.
Either way, the converter is the equivalent of magic to me, and I’ll definitely have a video coming up.