Greetings,
I am somewhat of a VMware novice, but currently have two (soon to be three) ESXi hosts under my belt. They are all at separate locations.
I was not involved in the existing server in any way prior to this, but now it is mine. I was "thrown to the wolves" after the fact.
This will be the first "production" P2V conversion I am attempting. Though it will be the only VM on the host at this time, I do anticipate further VMs on this host in the future.
Given my restrictions, I would like to know the easiest way to do this conversion. The last two hosts I did were new installs (Server 2012 Essentials and Std), not conversions. Though, just for learning purposes, I DID do standalone P2V conversions of both of the existing physical servers, but never put them into production. I can't remember if I actually spun them up or not. It was a while ago. I think I did. They were both SBS 2003 physical servers. For a variety of reasons I do not have the luxury of a new install with this new system.
New host: HP ML350p Gen 8. 64 GB RAM, 1+ TB usable RAID 5 internal storage. 2 Xeon 6 core CPUs. ESXi 5.5.0 Upd 2. The latest HP firmware updates.
Existing physical server: Dell something. 1 Xeon 3060, 4 GB RAM, 300 GB non redundant internal storage (one 300 gb volume). Windows SBS 2011 Std. Running Exchange Server (2010) and SQL for SBS monitoring & SharePoint.
The existing physical server is the only server on the network, is (obviously) a domain controller, and the network is "flat". One subnet, no routing.
As mentioned above I have run the converter on a couple of other machines, They were both single servers, on single subnets but neither of them were running Exchange, SQL or Sharepoint.
The various forums and and information I could find on the net has for the most part, been conflicting and sometimes confusing as well.
I did find a couple of posts that mentioned stopping both Exchange and SQL before the conversion. This seems to make sense for obvious reasons. What else do I need to know of/should be aware of/watch out for etc.
Thanks for any insight you may be able to provide.