Chapter 8 – Migrating Physical Machines

Publisher Summary This chapter outlines the steps involved in the migration of physical servers to a virtual environment. Building the environment required for the virtualization is the first step involved in this process. This environment consists of an Automated Deployment Services (ADS), Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP), and the virtual server migration tool. For the creation of the virtualized machines, the Virtual Server Migration Tool (VSMT) uses a virtual network. The default network that is used is VM0. Next the hardware information of the server is gathered by running a tool (GatherHW.exe) on the physical server. To gather all the information, the tool uses Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI). The hardware is validated to generate the migration scripts. Validation is required to check if the source server hardware and operating system configurations are compatible with Virtual server and VSMT. These scripts automate the virtualization process. The next step in the migration process is capturing images of the data from the physical disk, which is done by running one of the generated scripts. The target virtual machine is then created by running another one of the generated scripts. Finally, the image files are deployed to the created virtual machine by running another generated script.