WoodITWork.com

Time to finish up all those conversions before it could be too late!

We all know that Microsoft Windows NT and Windows 2000 are no longer supported by Microsoft but there are still many many instances out there begging for an upgrade but running applications which just cannot easily be moved or are working fine so people don’t see a reason to upgrade.

Often these servers are also running on some very old hardware so converting them to VMs at least allows you to move off the old hardware but making them VMs using VMware’s P2V tool is going to get harder as time goes by.

VMware vCenter Converter Standalone 4.3 has dropped support for Windows NT and 2000.

It’s all there in the release notes.

You can still use the old Converter 4.0.1 to P2V your Windows NT and 2000 servers but this may be not supported by VMware depending on what ESX version you are converting to.

You can use 4.0.1 to convert to ESX 4.0 but not to ESX 4.1 although I can’t see why this wouldn’t actually work despite it not being supported.

If you need a supported conversion, hopefully you haven’t been very keen and upgraded all your hosts to 4.1 yet. You could in theory do a two stage process, migrate using Converter 4.0.1 to ESX 4.0 and then migrate the VM to 4.1.

If all your hosts are 4.1 well you may just have to be brave and go for it!