P2V Practices

Before conversion, the following best practices are recommended:

• Take advantage of conversion to delete useless files (such as temporary files or files unused for months or even years).

• Uninstall applications and deactivate useless services.

• Defragment the hard drive.

• If you do not have access to the machine’s local administrator account, create a temporary one to be used only for migration. Remember to delete this account after the migration.

• Stop all services that could hinder the migration process (for example, antivirus, scan disks, and backups).

• When performing a hot migration, it is preferable to stop applications, especially transactional applications such as databases.

• Try to perform migrations while the server is less active. (Migrations can take place at night, for example.)

• Ensure the destination host server has the necessary resources (notably disk space and memory) to run the new VM.

The following best practices are recommended after conversion:

• It is worthwhile to deactivate some VM devices that will not be used (such as the serial port, USB port, parallel port, and disk drive).

• Disconnect the CD-ROM drive in the VM if it is not actively being used. • Uninstall or stop management and monitoring services and agents related to hardware and no longer required.

• Deactivate software that manages HBA cards or the load distribution of network cards. (VMware manages these.)

• Verify that VMware Tools is installed properly.

• Verify that the virtual hardware was properly installed in the Windows device manager (that is, no question mark or exclamation point icons noting issues).

• Delete devices that generate errors in the event log (for example, the ILO card).

Issues and Troubleshooting：

Physical to virtual conversions can fail to start. Typically, we have found this is because of one of the following reasons:
1. No Permissions Admin$
2. Firewall exists between server to be converted and vCenter
3. Incorrect DNS configurations