V2V cold clone process for SBS / exchange / sql / DC’s etc….. (works in vSphere)
Steps to convert from hyper-v guest to vmware guest
- Remove hyper-v integrated services while hyper-v guest is running. (if possible)
- Note down NIC networking details first
- Clean shutdown hyper-v guest
- Use StarWind Converter (free) to convert VHD to “dynamically growing VMware” image and use “IDE” as type. Note “SCSI” does NOT work if you have not got the LSI / BUS drivers in the source image, just use the default options – dynamic vmware and IDE.
- Create VMware guest shell (virtual machine equivalent to hyper-v specs but without the disks) – remove all hard drives, iscsi controller should also disappear.
- Upload the VMDK to same data store as virtual machine and attach to the virtual guest in the right order. They should be detected as “IDE”
- Start new vmware guest
- If you could not remove integrated services (i.e. hot clone), then you MUST disable hyper-v services immediately.
- Install vmware tools – reboot
- Remove hidden NIC and other orphaned devices, and reconfigure network card as per original.
- Windows may need to be re-activated – do this.
Note : converting a machine to use an IDE controller will limit its performance!
Continuing on from this http://sigtar.com/2010/02/04/vsphere-and-multipathing-iscsi/
you may want to implement jumbo frames to your iSCSI backend…
Enable jumbo frames on your iSCSI target and switches then complete the following on the ESXi hosts (iSCSI initiators)…
This to list your current switch details and port group names…
esxcfg-vswitch -l
The follownig to allow jumbo frames onto your vswtich (insert your vSwich in following)
esxcfg-vswtich -m 9000 vSwitch0
Then delete and recreate your kernel port groups that you setup for iscsi, my commands looked like this… (repeat for each iscsi kernel port you have)
esxcfg-vmknic -d iSCSI-1
esxcfg-vmknic -i 10.0.0.101 -n 255.255.0.0 -m 9000 iSCSI-1
to confirm you have set the MTU (frame size) correctely, run the following….
esxcfg-vmknic -l
you should see your iSCSI kernel ports with a MTU of 9000 all going well.
First format your usb / flash drive with FAT. Then copy all the contents of the installer .iso onto the drive.
Next delete isolinux.bin and rename isolinux.cfg to syslinux.cfg
Edit syslinux.cfg and append “usb” to the line starting with “append” … i.e. similar to this
append vmkboot.gz — vmkernel.gz — sys.vgz — cim.vgz — ienviron.tgz — image.tgz — install.tgz usb
Next grab the latest syslinux.exe (zip for windows) from here and run syslinux -s –ma <driveletter>:
Done.
Its quite easy to boot esx from a usb device or flash card..
First download the .iso, then browse with winrar or similar. See if you can find the “big”.dd file this is the file we need.
i.e. the ESXi 4 file is called VMware-VMvisor-big-208167-x86_64.dd
Next grab WinImage and “restore image to physical harddrive” choose the .dd file the select your usb / flash drive.
Done.