Almost all of us in the IT world have been faced with the \u201cemergency\u201d of an old yet critical system that starts to fail and that cannot be easily replaced.\u00a0 The scenario usually revolves around old line of business software that runs on old hardware\/operating system (Widows 2000, anyone????) which is impossible to replace (vendor has gone out of business) or is too expensive to replace.\u00a0 We (itgroove) run across this fairly often and while we may moan about the lack of planning on the part of the businesses that are facing the problem the fact of the matter is this is a common problem that causes grief for lots of organizations.\u00a0 So, what can be done to keep things running until such time as a \u201cpermanent\u201d solution can be found?\u00a0 The answer, in many cases, is virtualization.<\/p>\n
As you may know, I\u2019m a big fan of virtualization in general and of VMware\u2019s virtualization tools in particular.\u00a0 Truth be told, VMware ESXi and VMware Workstation have saved my butt many, many times; and they can save your butt, too, in the scenario we are discussing.<\/p>\n
Case in point:\u00a0 we recently had a customer come to us with a failing and very ancient IBM server running Windows Server 2000 (sadly, there is more of this out there than you might think).\u00a0 Parts are pretty much impossible to come by for the server and one of the three SCSI drives in the RAID5 raidset had failed.\u00a0 The customer was facing a real crisis as the server houses their core line of business application that cannot, easily, be moved to a newer O\/S.\u00a0 If another drive failed they would be in deep trouble.\u00a0 Of course, their budget also precluded getting much in the way of a new server so what could we do to help them?<\/p>\n
This is where a bit of lateral thinking and tools from VMware came in.<\/p>\n
VMware ESXi (otherwise know as vSphere 5 Hypervisor) runs on a wide range of hardware and I have run it on a number of desktop machines in lab and migration environments quite successfully.\u00a0 There are some caveats, of course, but so long as your machine supports virtualization and 64-bit O\/S\u2019s (in other words, most \u201cmodern\u201d Intel and AMD CPU\u2019s), has non-software RAID SATA drive(s) and sufficient RAM, then you should be in good shape.\u00a0 You might have to splurge for a decent NIC as a lot of the desktop motherboard NIC\u2019s aren\u2019t recognized by ESXi but a decent NIC is not expensive (less than a hundred bucks Canadian for a decent Intel).\u00a0 And be aware that you probably have to enable virtualization support in your BIOS.<\/p>\n
Anyway, we helped the customer obtain an HP desktop machine from our local Best Buy that met the requirements listed above and we loaded it up with ESXi (the free version).\u00a0 ESXi recognized all of the hardware and allowed us to create a datastore on the 1TB SATA drive with no problems.\u00a0 ESXi installs in about 10 minutes so installation takes no time at all.<\/p>\n
VMware makes their conversion tool, VMware vConverter Standalone, available for free and it is the tool normally used to convert a physical machine into a virtual machine that can run under VMware ESXi, VMware Workstation or VMware Server.\u00a0 We obtained a copy of vConverter 5 (to match our version of ESXi) and attempted to install it on the failing Server 2000 machine.\u00a0 For some reason, the conversion tool would not load properly on the machine and I was a bit stumped as this was the first time, ever, that I had run into this sort of a problem with the vConverter tool.\u00a0 I decided I would try running the conversion routines from inside VMware Workstation 7 as they offer slightly different options to those given by vConverter.\u00a0 (Workstation is not free but it\u2019s also not terribly expensive, either.)\u00a0 The Workstation conversion agent installed into the Server 2000 machine correctly and I was able to start up the conversion process with the output being pointed at the ESXi machine.\u00a0 Conversion of the Server 2000 box (about 65 GB\u2019s in total) took about 2 1\/2 hours.\u00a0 The speed of the conversion may vary depending on the machine you are running Workstation on, in my case it was my three year old HP laptop running a dual-core AMD Turion CPU.\u00a0 A newer more powerful system may have run the conversion in less time.<\/p>\n
Once conversion completed we logged into the ESXi box using the vSphere client, made some adjustments to the virtual machine configuration then fired up the now converted Server 2000 virtual machine.\u00a0 The VM started up without a hitch (yay!) and after a bit of time we were at the Server 2000 login screen.\u00a0 We logged into the machine and verified all the bits and pieces expected were intact then we installed VMware Tools into the VM.\u00a0 VMware Tools provides all of the \u201cmagic\u201d that really makes a VM \u201csing\u201d and, once installed, we were able to adjust the \u201chardware\u201d assigned to the VM and we expanded the memory assigned to the VM and installed a higher-performance NIC.\u00a0 Once all of that was done we removed all of the \u201cghosted\u201d hardware from the VM, rebooted, and that was that.\u00a0 The customer then logged into his line of business app and marvelled at how much faster it operated.<\/p>\n
A conversion such as this can only be considered a short-term \u201csave\u201d as, obviously, a desktop machine can NOT replace a properly configured server.\u00a0 However, as an ESXi VM can be easily transported to another ESXi server it would not take much to obtain and configure a \u201cproper\u201d server with ESXi then migrate the VM to the new server.\u00a0 In fact that is what this customer is going to do a bit down the road once they have budget in place and the HP desktop will then be repurposed as a \u201creal\u201d desktop machine.\u00a0 Win, win!<\/p>\n
In a real pinch, the conversion could also be run directly into VMware Workstation or into VMware Server which are both hypervisor products that run on top of a Windows operating system (Workstation on top of XP, Vista or windows 7; Server on top of Server 2003 or Server 2008).\u00a0 While less efficient than ESXi which runs directly on the underlying hardware, the end result is the same \u2013 an operational VM that now runs on stable hardware and which provides the services the business is so reliant upon.<\/p>\n
You can explore the options available to you from VMware at www.vmware.com<\/a>.\u00a0 There are other virtualization options available from other vendors such as Citrix and Microsoft (to name but two) but I have not tested this scenario using other vendor\u2019s tools.\u00a0 Instructions for displaying and removing \u201cghosted\u201d hardware in a VM are available from http:\/\/www.tech-recipes.com\/rx\/504\/how-to-uninstall-hidden-devices-drivers-and-services\/<\/a> or http:\/\/forums.techarena.in\/tips-tweaks\/1161554.htm<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"