Portability Suite provides mechanisms for configuring your conversion job to handle your workload volumes and their physical or virtual layout in the target infrastructure.
When virtualizing a workload, you can select which volumes you want included on the target and manage their free space sizes. You can also control how physical disk arrangement on your source is propagated on the peer virtual machine according to the target virtualization platform’s storage media configuration and virtual disk handling features and capabilities.
When you are migrating workloads to physical hardware, you can select which source volumes to include and size, and which target disks to repartition and populate.
Portability Suite supports RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) storage, which it treats like any other storage hardware. As long as the associated storage controller driver is present, Portability Suite successfully completes the migration. Portability Suite does not support software implementations of RAID.
Portability Suite supports SAN storage. As long as the driver for the associated host bus adapter (HBA) is present, Portability Suite successfully completes the migration. Portability Suite treats SAN LUNs like any other disk with logical volumes.
Portability Suite supports Network Attached Storage (NAS) systems. Portability Suite treats NAS like any other disk with logical volumes.
Portability Suite supports Windows dynamic disks, including mirrored, spanned, and RAID 5 configurations.
Portability Suite treats dynamic disks like it treats any other logical volume. When you are converting workloads that have dynamic disks, the disks on the target workload are created as basic disks, which you can use to remove unnecessary or obsolete dynamic disk configurations. After the conversion, you can upgrade the required disks on your targets from basic to dynamic disks.
Portability Suite supports logical volumes of Linux workloads. If Logical Volume Manager (LVM) is installed on your Linux source, you can use several LVM1 and LVM2 features to better manage your target workload’s volume layout and organization.
You can set up your workload migration job to:
Re-create logical volumes of the source on the target, or create logical volumes on the target even if the source is not using LVM.
Create new volume groups on the target that are not on the source, or omit volume groups from the target that are present on the source.
Rename volume groups on the target.
Distribute volumes to different volume groups and disks.
NOTE:Portability Suite does not support:
LVM snapshots. You can create LVM snapshots on your target after the migration completes.
LVM mirrors. You can re-create mirrored logical volumes on the target after the conversion completes.
Storage layout and volume configuration settings depend on the job configuration mode (Advanced or Wizard), conversion type, target virtualization platform, and source operating system.
Use this Conversion Wizard page to specify a disk mapping scheme during workload virtualization operations.
In the wizard’s navigation pane, click
.Use this Conversion Wizard page to select volumes to include in the conversion and to adjust the volume size on the target.
In the wizard’s navigation pane, click
.Use this Conversion Wizard page to manage LVM (Logical Volume Manager) volume groups. This page is displayed only if the source has LVM installed.
In the wizard’s navigation pane, click
.When you are working in Advanced mode, the Peer-to-Peer Conversion job window provides access to a single configuration interface that combines the wizard’s Volumes and Disks screens.
To access drive configuration options in Advanced mode:
In the Conversion Job window, under the Drive Configuration section, click
.Settings vary depending on the target system.
Use these settings to select the volumes to copy during the conversion:
Use these settings to select the volumes and non-volume source spaces to copy and size during the conversion. The
tab is available only if LVM is installed on the source.Use these settings to select source volumes to copy, non-volume source spaces to recreated and size, and target disks to repartition and populate.
Use these settings to manage volume groups.
When configuring a peer-to-peer virtualization job in Advanced mode, the job configuration window provides access to settings specific to the target virtualization platform.
The following are drive configuration settings specific to Microsoft Virtual Server and VMware Server (formerly GSX):
The following are VMware ESX 3-specific drive configuration settings:
The following are VMware ESX 2-specific drive configuration settings:
The following are volume configuration options for Solaris zones.
When you are using Server Sync to synchronize two Windows or Linux workloads, Portability Suite provides you with the capability to specify the required mapping between source volumes and existing volumes on the target. See Synchronizing Workloads with Server Sync.
To access volume configuration options in a Server Sync job:
In Advanced mode: In the Conversion Job window, under the Drive Configuration section, click
(for Windows machines) or (Linux machines).In Wizard mode: Not available.
The following topics provide information about Server Sync volume configuration options specific to Windows and Linux workloads.
A Server Sync job for Windows workloads provides detailed drive and volume information for both the source and the target, and enebles you to specify the required mapping.
When capturing a Flexible Image or importing volumes into a Flexible Image, Portability Suite provides a mechanism for including required volumes in an image, and specifying volume data mapping and image configuration options.
Use this page, when setting up a Capture Image or Import Image job in wizard mode, to select volumes to include in the image and to specify paths to existing volume data.
Use this page, when setting up a Capture Image or Import Image job in wizard mode, to specify the image name and the path where it is stored.