Suite smoothes migration paths

The PowerConverter 5 migration tool can move both virtual and physical servers

On 21 July server migration specialist PlateSpin replaced its Power P2V 4 suite with PowerConvert 5. The change of name indicates that the updated suite does more than migrate physical machines to virtual ones. It can also migrate from virtual to physical, and from physical to physical. To that end, PowerConvert supports Symantec Live State and Acronis True Image, both tools for taking disk images of online servers.

PowerConvert runs on Windows 2000 Server or later, and requires a Microsoft SQL Server database to store data. We installed the suite onto a clean copy of Windows 2000 Server, which itself was running in a virtual machine under VMware ESX Server.

We allocated our PowerConvert system 512MB of RAM, a single virtual CPU and 4GB of disk space. In addition, any virtual server on which the migrated machines will first run needs enough RAM to host the new machine. The PowerConvert installation utility detected that our system did not have Microsoft .Net Framework 1.1 or the MSDE Microsoft database engine, and installed them for us.

We tested PowerConvert by migrating an instance of Windows Server 2003 from a new Dell server to a virtual machine running under VMware ESX 2.5.1.

To migrate a server, PowerConvert must first have it added to its database using a process called “discovery”. PowerConvert will automatically discover basic information about Windows systems present on the same network provided they are running Windows File and Print Services. It can also be forced to discover systems if it is supplied with their IP addresses. To migrate a server the suite needs to gather more detailed information, and for this it requires a suitable administrator username and password.

Having discovered our Windows 2003 Server, we migrated it to our ESX Server by simply dragging and dropping an icon in the PowerConvert window. The migration process temporarily installs software on the server to be migrated, and reboots it when necessary. In essence the process replaces the original disk and network drivers with ones that work in the virtualised environment, and then copies the disk partitions from the original hardware to the virtual server. Rather than store the partitions on the server running PowerConvert, they are stored directly on the ESX Server as a virtual hard disk (.dsk) file.

In our tests PowerConvert was not able to correctly migrate the Dell system partition. To complete the migration we needed to deselect it from a dialog box. If the conversion fails mid-way, the source server could be left in an unusable state. Ours was left at the DOS C:\ prompt and we needed to perform a hard reset before we could try again. On another occasion, because the available RAM on our ESX Server was too low the conversion stopped mid-way. We had to shut down the target virtual machine, allocate it more RAM and restart it.