Howdy,
I'm looking for a broad overview of what I need to do and in what order to migrate a W2003 Server to a virtual server environment. Specifically:
How does it work in general? Do I need to prepare my disks in any way? What do I install first? The toolkit? Virtual Server? Can I install linux later?
etc.
Any pointers welcome!
Depending on which virtualisation platform you're migrating to there are tools to perform physical to virtual conversions:
http://www.vmware.com/products/converter/
PlateSpin was the product that we were recommended when we virtualised a chunk of our hosting platform to Virtual Iron.
http://www.platespin.com/products/powerconvert/
It'll convert physical to Microsoft Virtual Server, Virtual Iron, VMware and Citrix XenServer amongst other capabilities.
In reality we just ran our internal server build process on the virgin VM's which gave us the opportunity to start out with fresh machines and without the configuration 'rot' that happens over time to servers of a particular vintage.
Here's what I was missing:
The virtualization software (VMWare, Virtual PC, Virtual Server, etc) is not an OS, it's an application that runs on an existing OS (The Host OS). Once it's installed in the host OS, you can install other OS's (Guest OS's) using the Virtualization software. So, there's no "conversion" necessary on your host OS.
Each Guest OS has some files associated with it in the Host OS. There's a file for the virtual disk drive, and a file for the virtual image. Your disk does not need to be specially partitioned or prepared in any way - you just need adequate space on the drive.
With that conceptual overview in place in my head, the rest became easy.
Kev assumed I knew more about the concepts than I did, and gave me pointers to taking an existing installation on some other piece of hardware and converting it into a Guest OS on my Virtual Server. I'll be trying that out for myself one of these days!