06 May 2005

Virtual Server Migration Toolkit (VSMT) Guidelines

If you're interested in using VSMT (Virtual Server Migration Toolkit)  for migrating a physical machine into a virtual machine, there was a new KB article posted up a few days ago which gives you some general guidelines. Note that there is one error in the article - it currently says it applies to Virtual PC 2004. This is incorrect (and I've submitted feedback). It actually applies to Virtual Server 2005.

If you want to see the VSMT steps through a series of blogcasts, have a look here . Thanks to Kevin for giving me the link to the KB - it was one which had slipped me by.

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# Jeffery Hicks said:
I've been testing VSMT for awhile, and finally and close to getting it to work. I hope a service pack comes out soon. But my real question is this: is it possible to resize a migrated disk so that it is *smaller* than the source physical disk? If my source hdd is 36GB but I really only need a 4GB drive, is there some way to shrink the disk? I saw your post on making a partition larger, and tried the steps with making it smaller in mind, but I end up with a non-bootable device. Any ideas?
11 May 05 at 1:31 PM
# jhoward said:
Hi Jeffery. Curious why you should get a non-bootable device - TBH I've never tried it in that manner, and unfortunately don't have an environment to investigate this on at the moment. However, you can definitely shrink in one way, but probably not what you're asking. At the Technet Technical Roadshows in the UK currently, I'm do a demonstration of migrating a W2K box installed in something like a 2GB partition on a 136GB disk onto a Virtual Server host. The default script sets the size of the disk to be created on the VS host to 136GB by default, so I update the generated scripts to bring the size back down to 2GB - as I said though, unfortunately those machines are in storage so I can't recall the exact change I made. Your best solution is probably to use a disk partitioning piece of software to resize the disk after the migration has completed. Not ideal, but I can't see any reason why it wouldn't work.
Hope this helps
John.
11 May 05 at 2:22 PM
# jhoward said:
BTW - there's no "service pack" as such directly in the pipeline. Obviously, I'll blog about any such thing should it become available or go to public beta etc. For now though, VSMT as it stands certainly does the trick :-)
11 May 05 at 2:26 PM

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