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I recently wanted to decommission an old Linux server to further consolidate services and cut back on the total number of machines running. The system was a Celeron 2.4 Ghz PC with 512MB of RAM and a 120GB PATA drive (which had about 15GB free). It had been running CentOS 5 and had run flawlessly while sitting in a wardrobe for years. It had two main tasks: to act as a file server for the household, and to initiate and receive backups from a remote server for a family business.

I first used VMWare Converter years ago when I moved to the Apple platform as I wanted to keep my old Windows XP system image and sell off the hardware. That was about 18 months ago and at that stage Linux support was considered 'experimental'. Performing conversions from Windows machines at that stage could be done live, and that method had worked successfully for me at the time. I eventually salvaged all the data from that Windows XP installation and wiped the image as it was no longer required.

VMWare Converter has since become far more mature and I was happy to find out that it supported RHEL 4 and 5 (and in turn CentOS). It can convert systems to either ESXi or VMWare Server (I'm using this) disk images.

Considering VMWare is giving ESXi away I assumed that VMWare Converter was also free. Wrong! After a bit of Googling I discovered that after signing up for a trial key to other VMWare products download access to VMWare Converter is also available. I burnt the downloaded ISO to a CD then booted from the CD on the old server. I was able to map a network drive over SMB to the destination server then start the conversion progress. This process takes a long time, especially if you only remember when you're 25% of the way through that the machine is sitting on a 10 mbit switch. Luckily I wasn't in a rush.

After the conversion was complete I was left with a directory full of VMDK files as well as the standard configuration files.

I was not really expecting the system to boot without a hitch at first, and it took a bit of troubleshooting to get it all up and running. Thanks to this document on the Red Hat Knowledgebase and this useful post on the Fedora development mailing list I was able to get the system to boot after building a new initrd image.

The couple of hours I spent troubleshooting and reconfiguring the new virtual machine was time worth spent. I was confident from the beginning that I'd be able to get the system converted, and was prepared to spend some time troubleshooting any issues that might come up. Converting the machine saved me a lot of time, since decommissioning the whole server would have involved moving/sorting out all the data that was on there. Having been used as a file server by 4 people over a few years meant that the main shared directory was a complete mess.

Anyone running systems on old hardware which they want to get rid of to save power/clear physical space, etc. should take a good look at how VMWare Converter can help.