Greg, That makes a bit more sense. When converting a stock setup into a VM unless you want to manually recreate everything you're going to need to use VMConverter because the VMWare device drivers/modules are going to be different than the OS just talking directly to the hardware and not through the hipervisor. (think initrd.img problems)
Is this for ESX Infrastructure 3+ by chance? The only problem that we've run into using VMWare converter is that it has to pass through a WINDOWS (blah!) system in order to do its thing. The converter box basically sucks off the "golden-client" if you will and dumps it into a waiting VM, resizing the partitions if necessary. When I tried to take an image of a non-VMWare Linux config, and then PXE boot it to a VMWare Virtual it blew up so many times that I just gave up and went with the converter. http://www.vmware.com/products/converter/ If you have a licensed login for ESX 3+ then you can grab it from your account login downloads as well. If you'd like to keep trying with the partition thing, as my golden was an older 2.4 kernel baseline so maybe some of the newer 2.6's will adapt easier, I'd just go into the /var/lib/systemimager/scripts/$GOLDENIMAGENAME.master and modify the partition structure manually to make sure it's within the bounds defined in your Virutal machine. Once you do perform a single conversion you can clone the living daylights out of the virtuals with systemimager. For what ever reason it's faster to PXE boot a virtual and have it be sucked down from the imageserver rather than do a direct copy of the VMFS/storage1 sub directory. The nice thing about using SI to do the cloning rather than direct copy is that the VM's can reboot and not trample all over each other IP wise taking down your original if you were to just copy things around. The first one is the most painful and then it's all downhill from there... Thanks, Seth Hi Seth, We have sort of a strange configuration here. We are segmented into different vlans (virtual lans) that have different attributes depending on their purpose. One is for control systems, another is for diagnostics etc. The issues I'm having are two fold. The first is an intermittent problem with boel and dhcp (I'm working with our IT and Networking groups to resolve this one) and the other is the partitioning issue. Partitioning wise I get through most of it but fail when the end boundries are set. Basically it says that the area of the disk that is being partitioned is non-existant beyond whatever VMware allocates initially. I've tried both dynamically and statically allocating the diskspace (the .vxhd file size); neither seems to work and both produce the same errors. I was wondering if choosing a different target OS when setting up the VM made any difference or if there was some obscure settings I need to change to make it more SI friendly. The GoldenClient is a "real" machine and has been successfully providing images to other "real" machines for a few months now. We are trying to make the leap to VM'ed boxes without spending the time to build a VM specific image (the GC is fairly complex at this point). I appreciate any help or insight you can give me with this! Greg ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/ _______________________________________________ sisuite-users mailing list sisuite-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/sisuite-users
