Adventures in Tech

Converting a SOE install into a VMware imageLike most companies we have a bunch of SOE (standard operating environment) that run on our various machines.

We currently seem to be having a lack of physical hardware onhand as test machines.
I figured the second best would be to create an ESX server machine and then just load a whole heap of SOE images into that and use those as our test hardware.
I know the hardware layer drives will be different, however its good for just being able to run through testing of applications and testing software deployments which is my part of the world.

Only one question remains, how do you get these SOEs into ESX?
Just installing via the ISO into vmware fails, as the SOE doesn't have the driver files for vmware ESX.
The best option is to use the free vmware converter.

The vmware converter will convert various version of vmware images into different types but more importantly it will convert physical hardware into vmdk's (vmware disk files) that can be loaded into esx.

To convert our SOE into ESX I did the following.
1. Image a laptop with the SOE (was one test machine we DID have!)
2. Install vmware converter
3. Select vmware converter to convert the local machine directly into my ESX server.

During doing this I discovered something about vmware converter which is really cool!

You can select a remote machine!! This means I can install vmware converter onto a server or desktop and then use that to convert laptops etc that I connect up to the network into vmdk's without having to install vmware converter on each one!

It should be noted that this obviously requires full admin access to the machine that your converting and full access to the ESX server to import the images.

I'm not sure when this remote feature was added to vmware converter, but I don't remember it being in previous versions.

Certainly very cool! And now I have all the SOE images on my virtual machine to mess around with.

Caveman