I was playing around with VMware Converter and thought it would be cool to create a VMware Converter Appliance. I can’t put this up for download, yet, but I can describe how to build your own appliance. I will use Novell’s Suse Studio to create a thin Linux VM that contains only the necessary bits and pieces. Go to susestudio.com [...]

VMware vCenter Converter 4.0 has just been released. Don’t let this name fool you cause Converter is still also available as a stand alone solution for P2V’ing your servers! You can find the release notes here. So what’s new? Physical to virtual machine conversion support for Linux (RHEL, SUSE and Ubuntu) as source Physical to virtual machine conversion support for [...]

I was looking into converting the VIMA appliance from OVF to a regular VM. I wanted to run VIMA directly from VMware Workstation. For the windows version of VMware Workstation there’s a conversion tool, and Arne of ICT-Freak wrote a nice howto. (Although it’s in Dutch you will figure it out cause of the large amount of screenshots!) But I’m [...]

How about backing up that dreadful application/server that you couldn’t or did not wanted to virtualize to your ESX environment? It could be useful to have a copy of a server that for whatever reason you did not virtualize. The new VMware Converter plugin for VirtualCenter gives you this option. You can create a reoccurring schedule for a p2v, you [...]

For those who did not have any luck with the deleting of the dll(ssleay32.dll) described in this blog, there’s another possibility to enable the VMware Converter plugin without crashing your VirtualCenter client: Go to the following registry key: [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\VMware\VMware Infrastructure Client\Preferences\UI] And set the following key to “Enabled” “C:\\Program Files\\VMware\\Infrastructure\\Virtual Infrastructure Client\\Plugins\\Converter Enterprise\\plugin.dll”

Today I encountered a weird phenomenon which I did not encounter yet. I installed the VMware Converter Plugin for VirtualCenter client, so far so good. Only thing left to do was to tick the checkbox to enable the plugin. But as soon as I ticked it the VirtualCenter client crashed without any warning. I rebooted the server, and tried it [...]