V2P - Virtual to Physical conversion

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This became common to virtualize physical computers (P2V) in order to migrate computers from physical machine to a virtual machine without reinstalling the OS and applications. This happened to me one day, when I needed to move a virtual machine where we did not have any ESX server and we were not able to reinstall the application (the provider of the solution did not exist anymore and we did not have enough information to reinstall it).

 

The following process it not so easy and simple, but it is working:

 

On the virtual machine:

1. Run P2V in order to easily resize disks and Windows partitions to match physical disks (this is also duplicating the VM, good to keep a backup in case of failure)
2. Copy all necessary files for sysprep
3. Download all necessary drivers from the manufacturer (in my case, it was HP)
4. For HP Servers, download PSP
5. Uninstall VMtools
6. Clean files (temp files, old profiles...)
7. Prepare for the sysprep + manually edit some registry parameters and modify sysprep.ini to support multi-processor, raid card...
8. Turn off the virtual server
9. Copy an ISO boot image with any imaging tool (Acronis, Ghost...) to ESX LUN
10. Boot on the ISO and image the server

On the physical server:

1. Boot on the imaging CD and deploy the image to the physical server
2. Follow sysprep operations
3. Reboot several times in order to install all drivers
4. For HP servers, execute PSP
5. Re-configure the network interfaces

 

There is an example of Sysprep.inf:

 

;SetupMgrTag

[Unattended]

    OemSkipEula=Yes

    InstallFilesPath=C:\sysprep\i386

    TargetPath=\WINNT

    UpdateHAL = ACPIAPIC_MP,%windir%\inf\hal.inf            ****** TO CONVERT TO MULTI-PROC ******

 

[GuiUnattended]

    AdminPassword=qwertz

    OEMSkipRegional=1

    TimeZone=110

    OemSkipWelcome=1

 

[UserData]

    FullName="Owner Name"

    OrgName="Organisation Name"

    ComputerName=*

 

[Display]

    BitsPerPel=4

    Xresolution=800

    YResolution=600

    Vrefresh=60

 

[SetupMgr]

    ComputerName0=server_hostname

    ComputerName1=server_hostname

    DistFolder=C:\sysprep\i386

    DistShare=win2000dist

 

[Identification]

    JoinDomain=domain_name

 

[Networking]

    InstallDefaultComponents=Yes

 

[SysprepMassStorage]                                                            ****** FOR SmartArray 6i ******

 

    PCI\VEN_0E11&DEV_0046&SUBSYS_40910E11="C:\Drivers\storage_smart_array_6i\cp007096\cpqcissm.inf"

    PCI\VEN_0E11&DEV_0046&SUBSYS_409A0E11="C:\Drivers\storage_smart_array_6i\cp007096\cpqcissm.inf"

    PCI\VEN_0E11&DEV_0046&SUBSYS_409B0E11="C:\Drivers\storage_smart_array_6i\cp007096\cpqcissm.inf"

    PCI\VEN_0E11&DEV_0046&SUBSYS_40C00E11="C:\Drivers\storage_smart_array_6i\cp007096\cpqcissm.inf"

    PCI\VEN_0E11&DEV_0046&SUBSYS_40D00E11="C:\Drivers\storage_smart_array_6i\cp007096\cpqcissm.inf"

    PCI\VEN_0E11&DEV_0046="C:\Drivers\storage_smart_array_6i\cp007096\cpqcissm.inf"

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Written by Nicolas Buache

Created on Saturday, 14 January 2012

Last Updated on Saturday, 14 January 2012

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