P2V With IBM Blades

Monday, November 3, 2008 in Virtualization by slowe | 3 comments

A colleague and a customer passed me some information late last week about performing physical-to-virtual (P2V) conversions on with blades in an IBM blade chassis. (This was with an older BladeCenter chassis, not the BladeCenter H chassis.)

Apparently, if you run a P2V on a blade in the chassis without first selecting the blade on the chassis’ KVM, then the resulting virtual machine does not have a CD-ROM drive. Users will have to shutdown the VM, add the CD-ROM drive to the VM, and then boot it back up again.

I’m guessing this is because access to the chassis’ shared CD-ROM drive is handled via the KVM. In any case, keep this in mind if you are performing P2V operations with older IBM blades.

This behavior was noticed using VMware Converter. I don’t have any information on whether other P2V products are similarly affected, but I suspect that they would be.

Thanks to Chauncey and Keith for the heads-up.

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  1. Dan C’s avatar

    Dan C on Monday, November 3, 2008 at 2:04 pm

    Hi Scott,

    The media tray in a Bladecenter chassis is presented as a USB device. When the media tray is switched to a blade then the CD is hotplugged in as a new USB mass storage device. When switched away, it is likewise removed. The same applies for keyboard/mouse when switching KVM focus.

    You should see the same behaviour in an H-series chassis as you have an E-series, as they work in just the same way.

  2. Christoph’s avatar

    Christoph on Tuesday, November 4, 2008 at 7:53 am

    Confirm. Ran over this on IBM H-Series with Windows unattended deployments. Without the correct entry in the answer file, the Windows install on a HS20 blade would simply halt if it was not active on the KVM.

  3. Matt Brown’s avatar

    Matt Brown on Wednesday, November 12, 2008 at 2:25 am

    Thanks for the info… I’ve got a couple IBM Blades I’m planning on converting to VM’s in the next few weeks.