I have successfully P2V’d probably over a thousand Windows
systems over the past few years.
However, you do not have to do as many as I have to know and understand
that the post migration steps are very critical to having your virtual machine
perform well. It does not matter whether you are doing a hot migration or cold
migration, these steps should never be overlooked.
Here is a checklist I use when doing P2V migrations to make
sure I never miss a step. A quick tip before running your P2V migration…always
stop/disable relevant services on the source machine before starting your P2V
(i.e. Anti-Virus software, SQL, etc.).
Post Migration
Cleanup
When your new virtual machine powers up for the first time you
will want to go through this checklist thoroughly before declaring the system
is back online and ready for testing. Remember, at the end of the day it’s the
end user experience.
- Check the number of vCPUs. If your VM has 2
vCPUs but is only showing 1 in the OS you will have to adjust the HAL device
driver for your processor.
- Check the amount of memory. Is the amount of memory
assigned to your VM displayed in the System?
- Verify all virtual disks are present in the
system using Disk Management
- Verify the correct number of disks are displayed
- Verify the disk sizes are correct
- Install VMware Tools and reboot; adjust page
file for the system
- Set VM hardware acceleration to FULL
- I always set the system page file to System Managed once my system is
virtualized. I do this because a lot of the time the source machine and VM have
different memory sizes. Plus, if memory is adjusted at any given time you want
the page file to reflect the memory adjustment in the VM.
- Uninstall any applications/agents that are no
longer needed. HP, IBM and Dell all load management agents and software on
their systems. This software is no longer needed after the system has been
converted to a virtual machine.
- Remove the devices & drivers that were dependent
to hardware on the physical server (source)
- From a command prompt type:
set
devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1
- After executing the command above, execute the
next command in the same command prompt window: devmgmt.msc
- Once Device Manager opens click the View menu
and then select the Show Hidden Devices
option.
- Simply right-click the device and select
Uninstall. Click Ok to remove the device.
- Assign
the static IP address to the Local Area Connection and reboot the system.
- Upon
reboot check all Event Logs and verify that all Services configured for
Automatic Startup are running!
 |
| Command Prompt |
NOTE: If you are
performing a P2V of a Windows Server 2008 system you must open the Command Prompt
with the Run As Administrator
option.