Starwind

What it is

StarWind Converter is a P2V (Physical to Virtual) and V2V (Virtual to Virtual) converting software that is being used during Project Ragnarok to convert our physical servers to virtual servers on Valhalla. It can be found at https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-v2v-converter.

Using the tool

• Choose server or computer that you want to virtualize
• Run the tool (it can be found in \\midgard\shared storage\24pintechapps)
• Source Choices
  • P2V - Converts the machine you are using or a disk on it into a VM
  • Local file - A file located on the machine or via a shared drive
  • Remote VMware ESXi Server - Allows you to choose a image from a remote ESXi machine (This will require you to know the IP address of the ESXi machine and its user and password)
  • Microsoft Hyper-V Server - Allows you to choose a Hyper-V machine either locally or remotely
  • Azure - Microsoft Azure Cloud computing services, don’t think we will be using this
  • AWS - Amazon’s web services, don’t think we will be using this
• Destination choices
  • Local file - Lets you save the VMDK to a local file on the machine you are using
  • Remote VMware ESXi Server - Lets you create a virtual machine on a remote ESXi server and it will transfer the newly virtualized machine straight to it
  • Microsoft Hyper-V Server - Allows you to dump the file straight onto a virtual disk on a machine locally or remotely
  • Azure - Probably won’t be using this in the classroom
  • AWS - Probably won’t be using this in the classroom
• Select destination image format (may not get a choice depending on your destination choice)
  • VMDK - VMware virtual machine format
  • VHD/VHDX - Microsoft virtual hard disk format
  • QCOW2 - Probably won’t be using this file format
  • IMG/RAW - Raw image, this image is suitable for StarWind but we probably won’t be using this.
• The rest should be self explanatory, just wait for the process to finish