These settings will vary depending on the purpose of the server that is being virtualized. This includes the number of CPUs that will be assigned to the virtual machine, the amount of memory and size of the virtual hard disk the virtual machine will be using. Select Storage - The next page of the wizard allows you to select where the virtual machine will be stored, information about the storage locations that are available will be presented here.Ĭustomize settings - This page of the wizard allows you to customise virtual hardware of the virtual machine. Since we are using ESXi 6.7, I select ESXi 6.7 virtual machine for ‘Compatibility’ as this determines the ESXi host versions that virtual machine can run on, and the virtual hardware available to it.
In this example we will be using Windows Server 2016, therefore I will select Windows as the ‘Guest OS family’ and Microsoft Windows Server 2016 or later (64-bit) as the ‘Guest OS version’. Select a name and guest OS - The first set of options that are available to you allow you to select the name compatibility, guest operating system. On the VMware Host, select ‘Create / Register VM’ and then ‘Create a new virtual machine’.īelow is a brief overview of the different options available in the New virtual machine wizard: This post will be focusing on VMware, if you do not already have this configured, please follow the article below: Once you have both, you can begin converting your physical server to a virtual server. It is advised that this image is stored in a network share, as this will make accessing the image from inside the Rescue Media easier. The second thing we need is an image of the physical server we are converting to a virtual server.
Next the Rescue Media can be created, the article below contains details on how to do this:
Once the tools have been downloaded, use a third-party tool (such as 7-zip) to open the VMware-tools.exe archive and copy any .dll files to the C:\Boot\Macrium folder.
These drivers can be extracted from the relevant VMWare Tools, for your operating system, that can be downloaded here. Before creating the Rescue Media, it is important that the VMWare drivers are added to the Rescue Media, so that it can communicate with the virtualized hardware. The first thing you need is the Macrium Reflect Rescue Environment ISO (a bootable environment we can use to restore images). To convert our Physical Servers to Virtual Servers, you need two things. The steps below will detail how to convert a physical server to a virtual server using VMware (ESXI-6.7.0) and Macrium Reflect. Converting a physical server to a virtual server
This article will detail the necessary steps to migrate a physical server into a VMWare Environment. In the previous blog post in this series ( Virtualization with Macrium Reflect - part 1), we discussed the advantages of migrating servers into a Hyper-V environment and how this can be easily achieved with Macrium Reflect. Virtualization with Macrium Reflect - part 2