This is my first look at the current release of converter (4.0.1), release notes here. Some of the new features in this version include support for Windows Server 2008 and RHEL, Ubuntu and SUSE, also a few good things around hot cloning.

The conversion I’m doing was of a Windows Server 2003 Ent 32-bit physical server running on an HP DL380 G5 into a VM running on vSphere 4.0 U1, virtual hardware version 7. The process is almost identical to the previous cold clone version, the livery has been changed to reflect vSphere and vCenter in all the relevant places but it flowed the same. As with all conversions, it’s a good idea to prepare the server before conversion by disabling hardware agents (e.g. HP Insight Agents) and anything not absolutely necessary for the server to boot the first couple of times

Two good things: firstly configuring network settings seemed more robust (could be just me). I’d had problems with the previous version of the cold clone image where the network settings either didn’t take or would for whatever reason just not connect. Secondly, the conversion of this particular server was really fast. The server itself had two very small disks but both were resized (72GB partition into a 20GB partition and a ~570GB partition into a tiny 10GB partition), but the process did seem to run much faster than previous servers of similar size that I’ve converted with the old cold clone CD.

Only one odd thing with the end result was the amount of memory the virtual machine was assigned. The server itself had 4GB physical memory of which Windows sees 3.75GB. The virtual machine was allocated 3220MB during he creation process, not sure why this would happen.