Journal nizo's Journal: Converting a linux box to vmware image 14
Wow this was way more complicated than it should have been.
First of all, for some reason I couldn't figure out how to just make the vmware linux converter tool just dump a running machine into a set of files. Maybe it is possible, but damn if I could figure it out (though I hate reading the manual, so maybe it is buried somewhere). Anyway, the actual converter tool installed easily on both redhat and ubuntu boxes, but it kept bitching about my vmware server, so I ended up installing their free esxi version (bare metal vmware server). Then the converter tool seemed to happily chug right along, dumping the contents of the machine to be virtualized onto the esxi server.
This completed fairly quickly, so I then proceeded to surf to the esxi server and look at the newly created datastore. Looked spiffy. Then I downloaded the files.
And waited over 24 hours for the download to finish. For 76GB of data. I'm still tracking down the culprit (the machine I dumped it to only has a 10MB card [long story], so it could be the problem), but damn that seems really slow. But once I got it on the machine with the regular vmware server and added it, everything worked like I would expect. I may end up going to the esxi server eventually; we shall see.
vmware versions (Score:1)
What was the original piece of VMWare software you were going from? Was it VMWare workstation or the free VMWare Server (not ESX or ESXi)? Do they even still have that free Workstation/Server around? Actually, I think they do. I think I had to go digging around for it not too long ago because lazy co-worker couldn't do it himself.
Did I mention the new box I put together months ago? Beastly Intel i7. I upgraded my copy of Workstation from 5.0 to 6.5 and forgot how much I like Workstation in general, bu
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Yeah, I was going to the latest free server (non-esx); the converter unhelpfully complained about a problem with the version. However when I dumped to the esx server it worked without a problem (well except the ultraslow transfer, but I'm still not sure if that was an esx problem).
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I upgraded my copy of Workstation from 5.0 to 6.5 and forgot how much I like Workstation in general, but also the new features in 6.5.
I didn't like how the new version helped itself to installing a debugging plug-in to my Visual Studio. Without asking. And then, IIRC, every time I ran or compiled it caused a message to appear in the output window that something couldn't be loaded. And uninstalling the plug-in refused to work. I'm going to give MS's Virtual PC a try, since I can get it free now as a student,
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Correct about the fourth slot. It will run slower if you don't put the same speed stick in. Otherwise, yes I could get 4 GB sticks. But I've only found one set so far and it cost $799, so I think I'll pass on that.
The reason I wish I had 12 now is because Workstation allocates all the memory for a VM at once, rather than ESX/ESXi which starts at the minimum and grows as needed to the limit. So running more than 2 big VM's and 4-5 small VM's will cost me about 5.2 GB. My system still runs fine, but just
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I think Virtual PC is free for all windows XP and up users now, no student status needed. FWIW, the VPC shared folders have always worked seemlessly for me.
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I can see why it's free now -- it's totally behind the times. E.g. it doesn't, or doesn't readily, seem to support "snapshots".
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Yeah, it definitely lacks in comparison to Virtual Box, VMWare and the like. It's good enough for quick and dirty browser testing or virtual disk testing, but not really nice to use for anything long term and serious.
Too slow? (Score:1)
76 000 000 000 bytes over a 10 000 000 bits per second link
76 000 000 000 bytes over a 10 000 000 / 8 bytes per second link
76 000 000 000 bytes over a 1 250 000 byte per second link
Thus you need 76 000 000 000 / 1 250 000 seconds to complete the operation (at least, this is the theoretical limit)
That calculates to 60800 seconds
That calculates to 1013 minutes
That calculates to 16 hours
You claim 24 hours used... 16/24 = 66% usage of the line.
Doesn't sound that outlandish on a
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Yeah but they are connected through the same switch, so they should have been able to go full speed. Right now the copy from the original destination machine seems to be ripping right along, so I am thinking the esx web server is retarded somehow.
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I take it back; according to my current calculations, there are about 25 hours left to finish the transfer. So yeah, this crappy old slow network card sucks :-)
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Maybe it figures that if you're going over a network that slow you aren't in much of a hurry anyway.
It wouldn't have occurred to me... (Score:2)
...to use a special tool, what I'd have done is this:
* Create a new VMWare machine with a sufficiently large disc.
* On the existing Linux system, boot single user or with a live CD and do:
dd if=/dev/hda | gzip > hdaimage.gz
* Boot the VMware machine with a live CD and:
gzip -d hdaimage.gz | dd of=/dev/hda
Or variant thereof (for instance, straight over the network by using netcat - dd if=/dev/hda | gzip | nc -p 2000, and on the VMware machine - nc -l -p 2000 | gzip -d | dd of=/
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Yeah I was going to do something like this if I couldn't get the vmconverter to work. Which is probably much like what the tool did, but I'd rather let the tool do all the work for me if possible :-D
RTFM (Score:2)
Doesn't matter what hardware or software I buy, I always RTFM. Even if it's a fat book it still almost always saves times.
Now if I could get the wifi working right at Felber's, I may journal about that. They had wifi all along until a storm killed the DSL modem and the juke box guy that "fixed" it plugged the modem directly into the juke box bypassing the computer completely.