Monday, June 30, 2008

VMware P2V ( Physical to Virtual )



Exchange is still not supported in VMware. I wrote couple articles in the past and explained the decision is political, and I have not seen any other issues putting exchange on VMware except the Microsoft is not supporting it, it means we should never go for unsupported configurations. Imagine the trouble shooting tools for exchange won't work because of VM platform, or if you call support PS person will tell you, simulate the same problem on supported hardware and we will help you our (-:, I cannot imagine the stress and trouble any exchange administrator will face if the situation comes to this point not to mention about the business concerns when there is an outage.

We will have some of our exchange servers on VM (bridgehead servers), just because they don't house any mailbox and bridgehead server requires very little configuration, therefore we have several Exchange running on VM over the years and no problems so far.

I did couple P2V the other day for some for some of the exchange servers and run into problems when it comes to assign the IP address to the virtual server after successful P2V. The windows were complaining about the IP address conflict and I got the solution from one of my friend at work and wanted to share with you if you ever need it.

Open command prompt. Type the following:

  • C:\set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1
  • C:\devmgmt.msc
  • Click on Show all hidden devices and remove whatever is unnecessary. In there should not be any other NIC device listed, if yes uninstall them and reboot the box to end to the conflict

After removing all other adapters (most likely the NIC's belong to Physical machine) and rebooting it the VM will be happy and peaceful

Best,

Oz ozugurlu

MCITP (EMA), MCITP (SA)

MCSE 2003, M+, S+, MCDST

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