Re: FOAK: VMWare - creating a VM from a running machine

'Hog wrote:
Catman <catman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Chris Bartram wrote:
ginge wrote:
On Sun, 6 Dec 2009 00:06:15 +0000, Wicked Uncle Nigel
<wun@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Some time ago I remember VMWare released a tool that you could run
on an existing machine, and it would create a VM of that machine.

Now my Google mojo has deserted me and the ravaged corners of my
memory are empty. A search of the VMware site is fruitless.

Anyone?
VMware Converter.

http://www.vmware.com/products/converter/

HTH

Converter rocks. It works more often than not, which quite amazes me.
It is quite remarkable, to be sure.

<reads>
Good lord that's incredibly cool and not a little impressive

Our image enabled oncology EMR system is currently refusing to run stably for a full day, though it freezes for only brief periods. It is a large application suite and a very large SQL Server dB. Extensive monitoring on the application, database, hardware and network have been inconclusive. Pointers at best and by last week we had improved and updated the application etc as much as is available or practical.

I'm left thinking that there is an obscure and nigh impossible to diagnose hardware issue on the server or that the application has a weakness that the few centres of similar size (overseas) have masked with much more powerful hardware. So somehow we may have to move to a 2008 64bit environment with N processors. But the patient volumes are such that the services must run 5 days a week without fail.

So suddenly a VM environment comes to mind. I wonder how difficult it is to migrate a service into a parallel VM environment, migrate an image to different hardware, test then possibly reverse back out to straight OS mode.

I would have thought once it's a Virtual machine, leave it there.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/31/microsoft_hyperv_download/

All the VMware guys will throw their hands up in horror but I've used the Microsoft Hyper-V. It's fairly simple to setup and use with the full GUI install. If you've already forked out for a Windows 2008 server license for your 64 bit kit then it's an easy option.

Saying that VMware ESXi is free and does do away with the parent host OS.
http://www.vmware.com/products/esxi/
Usual marketing ploy of having to pay for the really useful features does apply though !

--
DozynSleepy
.

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