12/6/2006Saroj/P2V 1 Study of P2V and V2P Using UltimateP2V By Saroj Patil CS522 : Semester project presentation Professor : Dr. C. Edward Chow

12/6/2006Saroj/P2V 2 Virtualization Technology What is virtualization? Virtualization is an abstraction layer that decouples the physical hardware from the operating system thereby allowing multiple virtual machines, with heterogeneous operating systems to run in isolation, side-by-side on the same physical machine. Consolidating multiple physical servers to run in single platform (easy to manage). More reliable  Easy to restart a system by bringing another fresh copy of VM files Current solutions : VMware virtual server / ESX server Microsoft virtual server

12/6/2006Saroj/P2V 3 Using VM A virtual machine is same as a physical box without software. Thus to use a virtual machine, it needs to run an operating system to support its applications. For this, we need to somehow capture the existing software including the operating system and all configuration details on physical machine, and then transfer it to the virtual machine  This is called P2V in short. Usages: It can be used to a copy of prototype as a set of files (compact storage.) Allow the actual hardware to be used by other projects

12/6/2006Saroj/P2V 4 UltimateP2V One of many available P2V solutions. Created by Qui Hong, Chris Huss and Mike Laverick. It uses "BartPE" (Bart Preinstalled Environment) to boot the physical and virtual machine, and then uses Symantec’s ghost software to clone hard disk.

12/6/2006Saroj/P2V 5 P2V transfer…. Here are my steps to migrate physical linux machine (eca) to the virtual machine (starget1) on walrus. 1. Create UltimateP2V bootable CD/iso image. 2. Create virtual machine, starget1 3. Boot both virtual as well as physical machine with UltimateP2V CD 4. Clone the hard disk from physical machine. It utilizes the Symantec ghost software to transfer disk images. 5. Boot virtual machine and configure OS for the hardware components present.

12/6/2006Saroj/P2V 6 Creation of UltimateP2V Download UltimateP2V software from RTFM Education’s website. The boot CD uses windows 2003 software. In addition, it needs VMware VMXnet network driver, LSILogic driver, VMware SCSI “Buslogic” driver, Qui Hong’s “Fix- VMSCSI” FreeP2V plug-in, VMware tools and SVGA Graphics driver. It uses Symantec Ghost software to clone hard disk. Since “eca” contained NIC card from 3COM, we needed 3COM NIC driver to be added into UltimateP2V image. Using pebuilder.exe, I created the iso image file and then burnt it on a CD.

12/6/2006Saroj/P2V 7 Creation of virtual machine On walrus machine, VMware’s virtual server is available. I created a virtual machine named “starget1” in it, with one CPU, 384 MB of RAM and 32 GB of virtual hard disk.

12/6/2006Saroj/P2V 8 P2V process Booted physical and virtual machines with UltimateP2V disk. Started network support and configured network details like IP address, default gateway address and subnet mask. Started Ghost8 and set virtual machine in slave mode (as receiver to receive disk image), and physical machine in master mode (as sender to send its disk content). The master mode gives option to select source disk drive and destination drive. This transfers the details from physical machine to virtual machine. After the completion of cloning, the virtual machine is up and ready for use.

12/6/2006Saroj/P2V 9 V2P process The UltimateP2V CD created is also capable of transferring virtual machines to physical machine, Virtual-to-Physical. I reversed the master and slave modes. The ghost8 on virtual machine is started in master mode and physical machine was started in slave mode. I performed V2P from starget1 to frodo machine successfully.

12/6/2006Saroj/P2V 10 Lessons Learnt The UltimateP2V documentation is good to follow, creating the ISO image. When I booted eca with UltimateP2V CD, it did not recognize the NIC card, since the UltimateP2V did not contain the driver to work with 3COM card. I had to download the driver from 3COM site and integrate it with UltimateP2V. When I created the virtual machine, I did not allocate all the storage (16GB) to the virtual disk. But, the ghost needs the target disk to be at least same size or grater than the source disk. When I recreated the 32GB virtual disk with all storage pre-allocated, the cloning worked. At the end of cloning, the virtual machine still did not boot, giving error while reading the virtual disk. This arose, because, the VMware suggested creating SCSI virtual disk, but the eca machine had the IDE disk drive. I again recreated the virtual disk as IDE instead of SCSI disk. This then allowed the cloned machine to boot up normally. Due to paucity of time, I couldnot attempt virtualizing windows machine, but someone can attempt that in future.

12/6/2006Saroj/P2V 11 References :