P2V with SCVMM 2008 and Windows 2000
Recently I had the opportunity to carry out some P2V conversion and amongst the machines that I converted were a number of Windows 2000 servers.
SCVMM 2008 is restricted to an offline conversion and when conducting an offline conversion the operator must provide any necessary third party drivers for WinPE. These additional drivers must be uploaded to the SCVMM server and stored in “Program Files\Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008\ Driver Import”. You can either place the drivers directly in this folder or create a sub folder structure of your choosing.
An offline conversion consists of the following high level steps:
· SCVMM installs the P2V agent on the source computer.
· The SCVMM agent installs a Windows PE image on the source computer and modifies the boot record. As a result, the source computer boots into Windows PE instead of booting into the installed operating system.
· SCVMM begins streaming the physical disks.
· SCVMM prepares the virtual hard disks for virtual machine creation.
· SCVMM creates the virtual machine.
· SCVMM attaches virtual hard disks, network adapters, CD-ROM, and memory.
To carry out an offline conversion the source computer must meet the following criteria:
· The source computer must be running Windows 2000 SP4 and have the following components installed
o Windows Installer 3.1 Redistributable (v2)
o Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Redistributable Package
o Windows Update Agent update (KB946928)
· The source computer must have 512 MB of RAM
· The source computer must either be in a workgroup, in the same domain as the SCVMM server, or a member of a domain that has a full two-way trust with the domain that hosts the SCVMM server.
You can easily determine if the source computer meets the criteria by using System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 Configuration Analyzer (VMMCA) which can be downloaded from the following link http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=02d83950-c03d-454e-803b-96d1c1d5be24&displaylang=en
There are also some requirements on the target computer as well:
· Sufficient storage must be available on the target host computer (required to store the image of the P2V source machine which is being copied in VHD format while the target virtual machine is being built).
· The target host computer must be running Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V or Virtual Server R2 SP1
· The target host computer must have sufficient memory (256 MB of RAM plus the amount of memory allocated to the virtual machine)