Converting an ancient RH8 system to VMware ESXi

Posted by donatello on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by donatello
Published on 2010-04-26T14:36:24Z Indexed on 2010/04/26 14:43 UTC
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vmware

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esxi

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p2v

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linux

I am curious to know what options I have to convert a very old RedHat8 machine to a virtual one on ESXi.

Looking at VMware Converter it seems there's an option to login to the RH8 using SSH, and from there it will convert to the ESXi-server.

That makes me a bit nervous though, exactly what is happening there? The RH8 machine is slightly critical, and if anything messes up it'll likely result in many hours extra work. :(

Another option I thought of was to boot a LiveCD on RH8-system and create a raw "dd dump" of the disk. The similar method is used to restore the image, I boot a LiveCD on the VM in ESXi and use "dd" to write it to disk.

Is there any other option I could use?
I'm using the cheap version of ESXi, hence I have no access to the Converter BootCD so these rather cumbersome methods is the only I can think of. :)

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