philipnet

I had a DC that ran on a old PC. Whilst there was nothing wrong with the hardware, the hard drive used was 10Gb big and it made so much noise it was unbelievable!

I quickly grew tired of it – I know PCs aren’t the quietest of things but this was taking the mickey. So I hatched a plan to migrate the whole DC onto a VMWare instance on another machine.

Step 1: Install VMWare and get the VMWare console working.
I really need to mention that the destination machine was a headless Linux machine. I couldn’t get authentication across the network working, so I had to install various X and GTK+ libraries and Exceed on a client PC to complete this step.

Step 2: Migrate current HDD from old DC to new DC and create a suitable VMWare instance.
This was pretty easy. I enabled the least amount of hardware for the VMWare instance as I wanted to keep the Windows instance as light as possible.

Step 3: Migrate DC HDD to a virtual HDD.
I used PowerQuest DeployCentre to copy the contents of the old DC HDD to the new virtual one; this was within the VMWare instance and took almost an hour. Then reconfigure VMWare for only one HDD, the new virtual one.

I had completed the migration and had a really silent DC.