A customer has a bunch of really old Compaq servers running, you guess it a mission-critical application that nobody knows how to reinstall. So I convinced them to virtualize the machines as a business continuity plan. That way hardware failure will not affect applications.
The task at hand is to convert 3 Windows 2000, 1 Windows 2003 (Sharepoint), 1 Windows XP and 1 Linux machine to two VMware server 1.03
The Windows 2003 and XP machine went smoothly. Power up the virtual, enter the original IP address and everything is back in production. Interestingly I can cold convert 2 physical to a host machine with no performance hit.
2 of the 3 Windows require patching for a corrupted SCSIport.sys file KB891861. This was solved by installing the patch. Another alternative method is to manually insert the driver. scsiport.sys
Windows dynamic disks and attached SAN volumes were picked by the Converter and copied over with minimal fuss.
The most important thing to note after conversion is to boot the VM to safe mode and correct for page file, IP address and disable all unused services. Especially for Compaq services. It maxed out the VM looking for non-existent hardware. VMware server to its credit controlled the VM and the other machines were not affected.
For Linux machines, after conversion, you will need to boot using a Linux live CD, delete off all the configured hardware, alias the hardware to BusLogic and reboot.
Don’t forget to turn off the anti-virus software on the host machines!!