For some time I wanted to virtualize the only non-Windows server we had. It was a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2 server serving some old legacy application. This server had to be preserved en kept running for archiving purposes. So instead of letting it run consuming power and hope it wouldn’t fail (+-7 year old hardware?) we wanted it to be virtual. This way we weren’t reliable on old hardware and we had a flexible way of turning it on whenever we needed it.
With great enthusiasm I went to the datacenter with the VMWare converter CD and I performed a quick and smooth virtualization of the machine. However when I started the machine I got kernel panics and notifications of partitions that couldn’t be found.
Well after quite some time (it wasn’t the highest priority) and a lot of searching I finally found a blogpost called Virtualize a Linux Server with VmWare Converter 3.0.1. “This is exactly what I am looking for!” was my first thought. Well although the article is really clear (well done Manlio Frizzi) it helped me only a bit further.
So my first steps were those that Manlio Frizzi described on his blog. Virtualized the system to my ESX environment. After i’ve done that I downloaded the rescue iso of Fedora Core 3 (FC2 wasn’t available) and mounted this in the virtual cd-rom drive. After selecting “Rescue installed system” from the bootscreen it started loading the BusLogic driver. Then I selected English as my language and US as my keyboard lay-out.
