Vmware workstation 12 ovf import free.How to Convert a Physical Linux Server to a VMware VM: Comprehensive Walkthrough

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Running servers on virtual machines provides you with a list of advantages such as scalability, rational resource usage, high availability, load balancing, convenient management, data protection features, etc. For this reason, you may want to migrate some of your physical servers to virtual machines. This process is also known as physical to virtual conversion, and referred to by the acronym P2V. VMware is one of the leaders in the IT world in providing virtualization solutions and Linux is one of the most reliable operating systems running on servers.

One of the advantages of running servers as VMs in vSphere is ease of data backup. The conversion process can be divided into two main stages. Stage 1.

VMware Converter connects to a source Linux machine via SSH and allows you to select the components to be copied, such as virtual disks and partitions. According to selected components of the source physical Linux machine and configured settings of the destination VM, the converter will create a helper VM. Stage 2. Then, the converter starts the helper VM that boots from the helper VM ISO image, and copies all necessary data from a source Linux machine to a destination VM that has the status of helper VM until the conversion process is finished.

A helper VM is deployed from the Linux-based ISO image stored on the file system of the Windows machine on which the converter is installed. The location of converter-helper-vm. After copying data to the target VM, the VM can be reconfigured by VMware Converter if the appropriate options have been selected for the conversion job.

Install the converter on a Windows machine that can connect to your Linux machine via the network. The installation process is straightforward — just run the EXE file and follow the recommendations of the installation wizard. VMware Converter 6. Source System. Select the source system in the machine conversion wizard that is open. Select Powered on and Remote Linux machine. Specify the IP address, user name, and password used on the remote Linux machine. Otherwise, the error message will be displayed: Unable to SSH to the source machine.

Check if a firewall is blocking access to the SSH daemon on the source machine. A user called user1 with a password is taken for this example. Click View source details to view details of your remote Linux machine which must be converted to a VMware virtual machine. Hit Next to continue and switch to the next step. Sometimes the converter cannot run commands on your remote Linux machine and displays the warning: Unable to query the live Linux source machine.

Where user1 is the name of our user. You need to enter your user name. Destination System. Select the destination system. By default, the destination type is defined as VMware Infrastructure virtual machine if you are converting a physical Linux machine, and this is the only available option for converting a physical Linux machine to a VMware VM.

If your ESXi host on which you want to run the converted VM is managed by vCenter , select the IP address of your vCenter Server and define the credentials of vCenter administrator or another user who has administrative privileges for managing vCenter Server. Destination Virtual Machine.

Select the datacenter to store the virtual machine and enter the name for the target VM, for example, Ubuntuvm. Destination Location. Select an ESXi host to run the virtual machine and a datastore to store virtual machine files. You can also select the virtual machine version. By default, the highest supported virtual machine version is selected. In this case, it is version 13 because ESXi 6.

On this step, you can edit different conversion options. Data to copy. You can select all volumes or custom volumes to copy and select the virtual disk provisioning type thick or thin provisioning. It is also possible to store each virtual disk on a different datastore. This option is used to optimize the alignment of disk partitions.

Set the necessary amount of memory for the destination VM on the Memory tab. Set the disk controller, the number of processors and processor cores in the Other tab. Select the number of virtual network adapters to connect to a virtual machine.

Then select the virtual network to which each network adapter must be connected , network controller type and tick the Connect at power-on checkbox if needed. Advanced options. Post-conversion settings are located in this section. In our case, for converting a physical Linux server to a VMware virtual machine, only the Reconfigure destination virtual machine option is available. This option is used to configure the boot loader, update drivers used by the operating system to be more optimized for running a VM in the VMware virtual environment with the appropriate virtual hardware.

Helper VM network. The helper VM must have access via the network to the source physical machine running Linux in order to clone all files of the source machine. Check all conversion settings for your P2V Linux conversion and if everything is correct, hit Finish to start the conversion process. Wait until the conversion process is finished. The duration of conversion depends on the amount of data stored on disks of the source Linux machine.

If you try to start the Linux virtual machine after conversion, you will get the error: Error loading operating system. You need to boot from the Ubuntu installation medium and use it as a rescue disk. In our example, we use the Ubuntu As an alternative, you can change the boot order once by pressing Esc instead of F2 right after starting a VM.

After booting from the Ubuntu installation medium, select Try Ubuntu on the Welcome screen. In our example, the simplest disk partitioning scheme is used for Ubuntu installed on the physical machine. Now you can see which partition is used to boot Linux the boot flag is present in that string. After that, you can quit parted. Note: If you use a manual partitioning scheme and a separate boot partition to boot Linux, your list of partitions would be different, but you should similarly find the partition with the boot flag.

Create the directory on the RAM disk and mount the partitions used by Ubuntu. If Ubuntu is installed on a single partition, use commands like:.

Note: If Ubuntu is using multiple partitions, create separate directories, and mount each partition to the appropriate directory:. Check the disk identifier for each disk partition. Remember this new UUID. Hence, we must change b-e9abdae-afe3ab0a to dd05b02cecec8c2f8b.

Note: If your Linux is using multiple partitions, you may need to change the UUID value for other partitions or just define them as sda2 , sda3 , sdb1 , sdb2 etc. After converting a physical Linux machine to a virtual machine, the UUID of the disk has been changed on the destination VM and, for this reason, the boot loader GRUB cannot boot from the necessary partition.

In our case, we edit the grub. Replace the old UUID with the new one. The UUID occurs several times in the configuration file and editing this value manually is not convenient.

The text editor vim allows you to do automatic replacement of the source text with the target text by using the command:. Now you have to reinstall GRUB to the boot loader to the same directory where the boot loader was installed before. Unfortunately, the VMware converter Linux version is not available but if you want to convert your physical Linux server to a VMware VM by using only Linux machines, you should familiarize with the second P2V Linux conversion method.

In our example, Ubuntu 18 is installed on a physical machine that must be converted, ESXi 6. This option boosts speed since dd copies data by using Byte portions of data by default. Install qemu that is an open-source application for hardware emulation. You can install qemu on any Linux machine. In the Linux console, go to the directory where the img files you created before are located.

Convert images of your disks made with the dd utility from the img file format to the vmdk format. Qemu can be used for this task.

We convert one disk image in our example:. Now disk images are converted to the vmdk format and are ready to be opened in VMware Workstation. The details about VMDK file format are explained here. Make sure that VMware Workstation is installed on any of your computers.

The algorithm for a Windows machines with VMware Workstation is similar. Copy your vmdk files converted by qemu to that directory. We copy the sda-vmware. A New Virtual Machine Wizard is opened. You should pass all the configuration steps of this wizard:. Virtual Machine Configuration. Select Custom advanced to enable configuration of advances options.