Let's face it, when you think virtual servers, Microsoft
isn't the first name to jump into your head.
VMWare shows up a whole lot more than Hyper-V and chances are if you're
in a large enough organization it's the one you've got to manage.
The latest incarnation is version 5.5 which is primarily an
answer to a laundry list of bugs that started with the 5.0 platform.
For most people, the first time they get to play with
virtualization is in a sandbox like VirtualBox or VMWare Workstation. But what if you want to go beyond just taking
Ubuntu out for a spin on your Windows desktop?
That's where ESX comes in and even in a large deployment
you're going to find out that your most important tools are deceptively simple. That being the VSphere Client and VConverter.
The whole concept of Virtualization revolves around the
Host. It's the container (hardware) that
all your virtual machines live on. While
VMWare's VCenter suite has a number of tools and features to help you manage
the virtual enterprise nothing really ever strays that far from those two
tools. Know them and you've got a handle
on 80% of what VMWare is all about.
The VSphere client is your portal into managing a single
VMWare host and while you can learn a lot by creating a Virtual Machine from
scratch on it most people take a shortcut.
That shortcut is provided by VConverter which lets you take an image of
your physical PC and migrate it to and ESX Host. It's called Physical to Virtual Migration or
P2V for short.
As VMWare has matured so have the tools. VConverter now allows you to use backups from
programs like Acronis True Image and Symantec to create a new virtual machine. It also allows the import of Microsoft Virtual
PC and HYPER-V images and a few other formats as well. In fact, VConverter is so versatile that its
VM's can often be used in other virtualization platforms like VirtualBox.
That's the good but of course there's always a few bad
apples in the bunch. The most annoying
of which is the fact that VConverter still needs Windows. Speaking of windows, migrating a Windows
installation often requires having full administrative privileges on the
machine running VConverter as well as the disabling of UAC (User Account
Control) on the Windows P2V target. Those
aren't exactly best security practices in my book.
That there isn't a native Linux version of the VConverter utility
only exacerbates nagging problems with migrating Linux deployments to the
VMWare platform.
That doesn't mean you can't move Linux PC's to ESX or even
Workstation. The option is there, it just
doesn't always work and requires a lot of configuration of the Linux host just
to find out it doesn't.
Still, getting familiar with the tools is a worthwhile
endeavor and can only add to your arsenal of IT skills.
It's said a picture is worth a 1000 words so a video should
be worth at least twice that, so I've provided one below...
Enjoy!
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