Hi All,

I have a physical server running server 2000 and I want to migrate that over to a VM server that I am using (running esxi). Downloaded the older converter software that Vmware has (version 4.1) and I am getting an error saying that it can’t connect to remote machine.

All credentials are correct (attempting this while server 2000 machine is on) and the IP address is correct.

Anyone know a rememdy? Would like to migrate this over before the sever hardware decides to fail on me randomly.

Thanks

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Any specific reason you can’t rebuild the server as a 2012 R2 VM, migrate everything off of the old one, then stand it down?

You could try Disk2VHD, then convert it to a .vmdk.

Have you tried running the Converter on the 2000 Server itself?

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I am going to try installing the converter itself on the server 2000 machine and see what happens.

The server has some old application that doesn’t seem to be compatible with newer versions of windows.

That’s my suggestion. I bet it works.

Yea I can’t believe I didn’t think of that.

Will report back and hopefully that solution works well.

subscribed because I need to do this soon as well

This way has worked for me in the past when the remote option had failed.

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So far it is working well. Will keep this thread updated in case something goes wrong (would prefer it doesn’t).

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great, be sure to select best/helpful answers

Conversion was a success it just took a while for it to finish.

Just curious, what happens if I don’t power on the VM and continue using the physical machine? Will I have to redo the conversion again later on because it won’t be in sync?

Great to hear it worked!!!

If you continue to use the physical machine instead of the VM, the VM will eventually become stale. You might consider it stale after the physical service gets Windows updates for a couple of months, or an upgrade to the apps running on it or something else that brings it up to a “newer version” than the VM.

At that point, you can choose to remediate the VM, and bring it up-to-date with the physical server, or recreate it via a new P2V operation.

Gotcha.

Now it made a full copy of the hard disk. So if it was an 80GB hard drive it reserved that much on my datastore in my esxi server. I would prefer it to not do that. Is there a way to make it a thin provision? Virtual disk starts small and takes more as it grows?

I have no problem doing the conversion again for the sake of reducing storage size.

Thanks.

To create thin provisioned disks on the VM, do the conversion process again and make sure to select thin provisioned. It’s easy to miss.

Also, when converting, specify VMXNET3 NICs for the VM, if available. The Converter tends to put in E1000 NICs by default (again, very easy to miss), which offer lower performance.

Interesting. When you say lower performance you mean transfer rate is abysmal and goes at like 700KB transfer rate as opposed to 30MB/sec?

With the proper drivers installed you should not be seeing 700KB on any vNIC connected at gigabit speed, regardless. Still, the VMXNET3 is preferred for speed with lower overhead, as I understand it, over the E1000 or E1000e.

I think I might know why your recommended suggestions aren’t showing up. The win2000 machine has version 4.01 installed. The options you speak of are in 6.1.1 and I don’t see VMNEX or thin provision in 4.0.1.

So am I SOS?

Even if the VMXNET3 vNIC is not available for Server 2000, you should still see thin provisioned disks. At least I think so. There’s a page before you convert that lets you tweak a long list of things. One of those is disks and disk geometry, where you choose the disks and partitions that you wish to copy and whether you want to resize any. You should also be able to choose the format of the destination disk: thin, thick, etc.

I attached the pic of what my screen looks like. Now specifics like thick and thin aren’t there but I did see in the drop down for capacity “Min size” and “Maintain size”

Is that the option for “thick/thin privision”?

No, resizing is not related to the format of the virtual disk.

What do you get when you click the Advanced… link near the top, to the right of “Select volumes to copy?”

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