VMware VCENTER CONVERTER EN-000158-02 - Manual (Page 13)

Hot Cloning of Physical Machines
Converter Standalone supports only hot cloning of physical machines. VMware Converter 3.0.x supports cold
cloning.
You can select which services to keep running on the source machine while the conversion is running. To have
the destination virtual machine retain all of the blocks that changed in the source system during the cloning
process, you can turn on the synchronization feature. With synchronization on, if any changes occur on the
source machine during the conversion, Converter Standalone copies them to the destination machine after the
conversion is complete. This process helps you to prevent downtime on important services.
N
OTE
When you hot clone dual-boot systems, you can clone only the default operating system to which the
boot.ini
file points. To clone the nondefault operating system, change the
boot.ini
file to point to the other
operating system and reboot. After you are booted in to the other operating system, you can install Converter
Standalone and hot clone it. If your second operating system is Linux, you can boot it, install the Converter
Standalone Linux version, and clone your distribution.
Local and Remote Cloning of Physical Machines
Local cloning is a migration performed with Converter Standalone running on the source machine. Remote
cloning is migration when Converter Standalone is running on a machine different than the source. When you
perform a remote clone, you can access the remote source machine through the network, as long as it is running.
On physical machine sources running Linux, local cloning is set up and performed like remote cloning.
Remote Hot Cloning of Physical Machine Sources That Are Running Windows
You use the Conversion wizard to set up a migration task and Converter Standalone performs all of the cloning
tasks.
The following workflow is an example of remote hot cloning, in which the physical machine being cloned
experiences no downtime.
1
Converter Standalone prepares the source machine for the conversion.
Converter Standalone installs the agent on the source machine and the agent takes a snapshot of the source
volumes.
agent
vCenter Converter Standalone running
on Windows machine
powered-on
physical machine ESX/ESXi
source destination
network
snapshot
source
volumes
2 Converter Standalone prepares the virtual machine on the destination machine.
Converter Standalone creates a virtual machine on the destination machine and the agent copies volumes
from the source machine to the destination machine.
Chapter 1 Introduction
VMware, Inc. 13