Comments on: Converting a Physical Windows Server to Xen / Oracle VM, by way of VMware

By: muychingon

muychingon — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 19:59:11 +0000

This was very useful for me while I worked on the new PXE boot environment. See this: Adding Centos 5.3 to PXE thanks a lot!

By: ksarkies

ksarkies — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 05:05:26 +0000

The batch file starts with

—————————
@echo off

if “%1″==”" goto noarg

set ctdir=%1:\i386

goto tryit

:noarg

set ctdir=%SystemRoot%\Driver Cache\i386

:tryit

—————————

Just replace i386 with amd64, works fine.

Sorry haven’t used Win2000 – it seems to be a different beast.

Ken

By: steve

steve — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 04:31:32 +0000

Thanks for the helpful info, I haven’t done much work on this since I first posted. You mentioned you changed it to amd64 drivers, can you post those changes? Also, I’m trying to figure this out for Windows 2000, but can’t seem to get it right – let me know if you have any insight.

By: ksarkies

ksarkies — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 03:31:31 +0000

Thanks, this helped me a lot to get an existing Win2003 64 bit VM across to Xen, particularly the MergeIDE batch file (it is in German so needed a bit of translation. It searches the Windows i386 drivers; I had to change this to AMD64 drivers). There were some points I noted during the process that may be helpful to others.

1. You say to install VMware tools. Other advice I found said to uninstall them but I left them in. The end result was services that didn’t start and drivers that couldn’t load. Probably not harmful, but it would seem that uninstalling them is preferable.

2. The converted VM disks had to be raw format, which creates sparse files. I tried a number of others (qcow2, vmdk etc) but Xen just hung and wouldn’t boot or otherwise use the disks. I don’t know why this is the case; I may even go and read the manuals. I didn’t follow your procedure to the letter here. Instead of creating an install and deleting the resultant img file, I simply added the raw files during creation – I had several disks. Maybe this is the reason. Also the disks had to be IDE type.

3. Once up and running, install the gplpv drivers (see http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/XenWindowsGplPv) inside the guest. This will then allow SCSI disks to be used which overcomes a strange limit of four IDE drives in Xen, as well as boosting performance by a huge amount. The lack of PV drivers is the main reason I shied away from KVM.

Ken

By: steve

steve — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 16:53:52 +0000

It was a bad file, don’t know what happened there. I uploaded another copy, that should work. Also, I originally found it here:
http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Migrate_Windows

By: sauron666

sauron666 — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 08:47:04 +0000

MergeIDE.zip is bad file ???

I convert vmware image and start under Oracle VM, but getting error with “another hard disk – blue screen”

I try to find mergeide on the net, but nothing …

Please, help..can you see what’s wrong with that archive ?

Regards!