I had the opportunity recently to try to help a friend on his quest to P2V a Microsoft ISA Server.  We tried all sorts of different setting to allow communication between the ISA and in this case both Virtual Center and a Platespin server trying to get either one to be able to discover and migrate the ISA Server.  We added the conversion servers to the management group on the ISA box and disable RPC checking and still no dice.  We actually got a little further with vConverter by getting it to connect and install the client but it was not getting any further in the conversion process.  I am sure if we had more time we could have figured out the ports that needed to be opened but, time was not on our side.  Did you know that you can still get a cold clone CD from VMware?  I was looking through all the VI install files for all the vConverter files and was coming up empty but I found a blog post with its location and thought it would be worthwhile to re-post the post by Vladan Seget on the www.vladan.fr blog site.  The original post “VMware Cold Clone to Convert your Physical Machines, Where to get it?” can be found here. 

You cannot do a hot conversion every time.  Sometimes you need to perform a cold clone to convert your physical servers. Then you’re asking, where to get the converter cold clone boot CD?

So, there exists the cold-clone disc. This is a bootable CD-ROM disc that you actually boot the physical server from. The disc contains a pre-installed Windows 2003 image that runs a built-in version of Converter. Since you boot from the CD, none of the server’s processes start-up so you can get a good clone of the hard drive.

In case you want to download you must go and:

• Use Converter 3.0.x Standalone Enterprise Edition from http://www.vmware.com/download/download.do?downloadGroup=CONVERTER3.

• Use the VMware vCenter Converter Boot CD for vCenter Server. The most recent version is at http://www.vmware.com/download/download.do?downloadGroup=VC250U4.

Make sure that you log-in before you download. This means that you have to have an Store account, that means that you have already bought some product with VMware before.

Source: VMware

Cole Clone, ESX, vCenter, vConverter

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 19th, 2009 at 6:54 am and is filed under Virtual Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.