[PLUG] Open source vmware image importing?

[Brian Martin]

> At one time, I remember using an CD to boot a Windows XP machine and then using tools on that CD to create a VMWare image from that XP PC.
>
> Does anyone else remember what tools I'm looking for? My google foo is failing me...
>
> Russell Johnson
>

Russell,

I don't have the answer you're looking for, but I can share some possible approaches to consider:

1) I recall that VMWare has a "p2v" tool (physical-to-virtual).  Look for that, and more generally for "p2v".

2) Another approach is to boot a Linux Live-CD of one flavor or another, CloneZilla, or something similar on both the Windows XP system and the VMWare guest that is supposed to become the new virtual version.  Then clone the data across the network from one to the other.  In the most generic Linux approach, use something like:

	dd if=/dev/sda | ssh -C new-guest-ip dd of=/dev/sda

I'm doing that from memory, so there might be some errors there, but that's the general concept.  Some I recently used this approach to migrate a VMWare-based Windows 2012 Server guest to a Linux KVM guest.  CloneZilla probably does this better, but it has a mild learning curve if you're not familiar with it.

Earlier Windows systems were sensitive to changes in their environment (different NIC MAC addresses, minor changes in processors, etc.), that may require you to reactivate Windows, but you'll run into that regardless of how you get the disk image there.

                        -Brian Martin