Surgient Success

If I have a ghost image, can I convert that into something that can be used easily.  How can I do this?

Easily is the operative word in your question and the answer is no. VMware has a converter for P2V image creation. It would be better to use this.

Here is a link to VMware's site with more info on physical to virtual conversion and the download link of their converter.

http://www.vmware.com/products/converter/

As Kyle suggested. a good practice would be to restore the Ghost image to compatible physical server and install one of these three Physical-to-Virtual migration tools:

Platespin PowerConvert ($),
VMware Converter (free),
Acronis TrueImage Universal ($),
WinImage ($)

Each of these tools can seamlessly migrate a physical machine to an image that is compatible with Surgient VQMS.

 Lotter suggested yesterday that you open the Ghost image in VMware Player. That should create a VMDK file from it.

This isn't universally true. VMware Player technically opens Symantec LiveState files which is a different product than Ghost. Ghost version 10 has a file-format is that similar to LiveState and so this may work but I wouldn't count on it consistently. Most Ghost images out there are version 8 or 9. And Symantec just shipped an update for Ghost, version 11.

Not to mention, that the ghost image may not boot due to the difference in drivers. 

I would agree with what the others are saying.  It is obviously much easier to use one of the canned applications written specifically to image a machine from the physical to the virtual world.  I've used Symantec Ghost in the past, so yes, it can be done.  Saying something is done "easily" or not really depends on the machine and what's on it.  Drivers and applications will get you in the end.  If you strip out the hardware dependent drivers and applications on the physical box and then install the virtualization tools needed into the virtual machine, it should be in a similar state to what the P2V solutions offer.  Sometimes, the problem is a missing driver on bootup, which is why P2V software will typically add-in the drivers needed prior to power on, so that on boot, needed drivers are present. 

Good luck!

Has anyone used Platespin's PowerConvert image capturing tools?  If so, what was the outcome or successes?  We are interested in evaluating this feature of PowerConvert to capture images of produciton servers and then deploying them off to virtuals or physicals without out segmented network (specific for Surgient).  So and X2V for our Surgient testing?

 

We were primarily interested in capturing the images from raw data files as opposed to downing or placing load on our produciton systems....
Has anyone attempted this, any successes?

 

-Matt