Converting P2V of a Windows 2000 Server to vSphere 6.X

It's a shame but I recently had to P2V a Windows 2000 server, part of our legacy services, in order to free up and decomm an old physical server. It was not a pleasure at all :(

Planning

1) Download and keep VMware Converter 4.0.1 (VMware-converter-4.0.1-161434.exe) – To P2V Windows 2000

P2V Converter 4.0.1 doesn’t support any vCenter/ ESXi later than 4.x. So I ended up in installing ESXi 4.0 on a VM running on top of my vSphere 6.5 infra!

So 2) ESXi 4.0 ISO

I read articles of people using VMware WorkStation for this, but in my case I didn’t want the export job to run outside datacentre, due to security reasons.

My Windows 2000 Server that I need to virtualize is 200 Gig. So if you look at the disk size of ESXi VM, I made sure that It’s bigger than that. 

 

 

3) Check Patch Level of Windows 2000 server and make sure

> It’s updated to SP4 Rollup 1 (KB891861)

If not, install from here and reboot the server before running P2V job

4) Download and keep VMware Converter 6.0.0 (VMware-converter-en-6.0.0-2716716.exe) – To move Virtual machine from ESX 4.0 to vCenter 6.X

5) vmscsi-1.2.0.4.flp For troubleshooting - https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/100520

Steps I followed

1. 1)      Installed ESX4.0 on my VM that I created, configured it with an IP that is accessible from Windows 2000 server and also from my PROD 6.x vCenter
   2)      Installed Converter 4.0.1 on the Windows 2000 machine
   3)      Started P2V Conversion of the Windows 2000 machine to the virtual ESX 4.1
   Make sure you select  “SCSI” as Disk Controller and not “Preserve Source”
   
   
   4)      Once the conversion is complete, we now have the VM inside ESX 4. However as this is a nested setup, we can’t power on and test it.
   5)      Install VMware Converter 6.0.0 on a machine that has access to the ESXi 4 VM and your PROD vCenter. We will use V2V on this converter version to move the VM to our PROD 6.5
   Not tested with 6.7, but worst case, we can also download the files from the datastore and move to PROD vCenter!
   6)      Once done, power on and test.
   
   
   
   

You can then take a backup and do R&D stuff to keep VMware tools and Hardware up to date J

Issues that I’ve seen

BSOD with “KMODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED” error while loading windows.

This usually happens if you haven’t installed the SP4 Rollup 1 (KB891861) on the source VM.

I could fix it, without having to re-run P2V. Steps below

1. 1)      Detach the C:\ Disk from the Windows 2000 VM where you see this issue after P2V
   2)      Connect this disk to any of your existing Windows VMs.
   3)      Go to disk management and bring the disk online and assign a drive letter
   4)      Use 7 Zip and Extract KB891861 and vmscsi-1.2.0.4.flp that we’ve downloaded.
   Look for scsiport.sys under KB891861 extract – version 5.00.2195.7059
         And for vmscsi.sys under vmscsi-1.2.0.4.flp extract – version 1.2.0.4 
   
   
          Make sure the versions are correct. 
   
   
   5)  Copy these two files to the VM where we have the disk attached.

1. 6)      Navigate to WINNT\System32\drivers and rename existing scsiport.sys and vmscsi.sys to “–old”
   7)      Copy the two new files.
   8)      Bring disk offline and move it back to Windows 2000 VM
   9)      Double check and make sure that the SCSI controller type is “BusLogic Parallel”
   10)   Power on the VM to test!