Study%20of%20P2V%20and%20V2P%20Using%20UltimateP2V

1
Study of P2V and V2PUsing UltimateP2V

• By Saroj Patil
• CS522 Semester project presentation
• Professor Dr. C. Edward Chow

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

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

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 Symantecs ghost software to clone hard
  disk.

5
P2V transfer.

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

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Creation of UltimateP2V

• Download UltimateP2V software from RTFM
  Educations website.
• The boot CD uses windows 2003 software.
• In addition, it needs VMware VMXnet network
  driver, LSILogic driver, VMware SCSI Buslogic
  driver, Qui Hongs 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.

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Creation of virtual machine

• On walrus machine, VMwares 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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References

• http//www.vmware.com/pdf/virtualization.pdf
• http//www.rtfm-ed.co.uk/?page_id174
• http//www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/
• http//support.3com.com/infodeli/tools/nic/index.h
  tm