6.10. Solutions Fast Track 6.10.1. 6.10.1.1. P-to-V Terms - The source server is the physical server that you'll be migrating into your virtual infrastructure.
- The target server is the target virtual server that you'll be migrating your source server into.
- The swing server is where you'll place the images of your source servers.
6.10.1.2. cat Your Hard Drive - With the cat p-to-v process, you make a copy of your hard drive at the block level, and then pipe the standard output of the cat command into another file located on a swing server.
- Using the native Linux command cat, you can image your physical server. That image can then be pulled into a virtual machine using a process very similar to the one you used to extract it from the physical server.
- The cat p-to-v process works 100 percent of the time with any physical server running any operating system.
6.10.1.3. BartPE - If you're more comfortable with Windows, then use BartPE and Ghost 8.0 to create the image of your physical server, which you can then Ghost into a virtual.
- BartPE allows you to create a bootable Windows CD-ROM or DVD that generates a Win32 environment where applications such as Ghost can be run.
- BartPE requires its own Windows XP or Windows 2003 Server license.
6.10.1.4. VMware P2V Assistant 2 - VMware's P2V Assistant is a tool that creates virtual machines from physical machines and takes care of changing out the Hal and Ntoskrnl files to correct versions.
- The tool works on Windows platforms only and is fairly straightforward.
- The tool can take a Ghost image and turn it into a virtual machine.
6.10.1.5. Platespin PowerP2V - The tool with the most bells and whistles is Platespin PowerP2V, which allows for multiple p-to-vs running at the same time, schedules p-to-v jobs, allows for disk resizing on the fly, and, of course, changes out Hal and Ntoskrnl files for you.
- Like VMware's P2V Assistant, Platespin handles adding the correct Hal and Ntoskrnl files as part of the migration process.
- Unlike VMware's tool, Platespin can migrate Linux servers as well.
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