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Submitted by NPSNHS on 2 May 2008 - 11:57am.

Hello,

It is really great to hear talk of creating a tool to virtualize Netware servers; this is a long time in coming. Essentially for those of us with limited time and staffing, a tool that would automate the creation of virtual servers from bare metal is crucial.

What the tool should be capable of at minimum is listed below:

1) Creation of virtual Netware servers from bare metal, that run on either Xen, or Vmware, not just one or the other. We need to maintain our level of choice.

2) The ability of the tool to essentially run with minimal user intervention on Win 32/64 platforms, and also Linux.

3) The ability to resize NSS volumes as needed to help optimize virtual machine image size, and to allow for growth of virtualized volumes without hidden consequences.

4) The tool must do the conversion with minimal to no final configuration with respect to changes in networking, delivered services, and the final virtual machine image must work on first boot/power-up.

5) The tool must not disable e-directory like a migration currently does after the migration is complete. If the VM does not work, the production server must be able to be brought back on-line without direct support from Novell.

Keep in mind that these are bare minimum requirements, and are off the top of my head. I will post more as I think about the ability to have Netware VM's running; what a great thing that will be. Being able to take snapshots of a VM for backup and disaster recovery will be a godsend!

Submitted by Marcel_Cox on 6 May 2008 - 3:46am.

While overall I agree with you, I strongly disagree with you on point 5. The migration tool rightfully disabled eDirectory on the source server at the end of the migration because brining the server online again by mistake might create haevoc on the eDirectory tree. Furthermore, if you read the documentation of the Migration Wizard, you would see that reviving the old source server is just a one minute operation which does not require intervention from Novell. A consider the non destructive disabling of eDirectory on the source server an essential safety feature without which a number of customers might create a lot of damage.

Submitted by NPSNHS on 7 May 2008 - 8:51am.

Hi Marcel,

On point 5, I do share your point by and large when it comes to having eDir lock upon a successful migration. I have seen quite a number of instances where a call to Novell was needed due to a failed migration, so that the old server could be brought back on line. The instructions/documentation contained in the migration wizard are good, but not perfect, which was my main thought for not having eDir lock upon successful migration.

Perhaps Novell could come up with a VM creation tool that was smart enough to know if the VM creation was truly successful or not, and thereby either leave eDir unlocked for another try at creating another VM, or locked in the case that VM creation was successful.

I all else fails, and it is not feasible to create the VM tool in this manner, then it would still be ok to have it work similarly to the migration wizard whereby eDir is locked whether or not the migration is successful.

I was glad to see your comments, and to know I'm not the only one looking forward to a tool for creating Netware VM's from bare metal.

Submitted by ecyoung on 8 August 2008 - 10:53am.

Does anyone know what the result of this survey was? I am curious whether Novell decided if a future release of Platespin PowerConvert support migrating physical Netware machines to VM. Nobody else is capable of doing anything close to this with the current release of Netware 6.5 (sorry, Portlock Storage Manager still only supports SP6 as of yet).

Submitted by Anonymous on 12 December 2008 - 4:41pm.

Portlock Storage Manager does in fact support SP7. What it does not support is "Hard links" as far as their current version (PSM 4.01) is conecerned. Which, how many Netware users do you find using this feature? Not too many. Portlock provides a beta that does in fact support hard links if that is a must for your environment.

After a brief scan from all previous comments I would say that Portlock already takes care of 98% of these issues.

Submitted by gldavis on 10 March 2009 - 2:35pm.

Portlock does have a tool to migrate physical NetWare to a VMware Virtual Machine (see video link below). However I don't think it supports migrating to XEN, as the Portlock tools require the dos client to run, which I don't believe is supported (nor works) in Xen.

http://www.solutioncentre.co.uk/blog/index.php?m=1...