Well, it turned out that the slow conversion of the second system was probably due to a problem with PowerConvert not assigning the fixed IP address. In the end we decided to enter it manually into the VM and then the conversion went on.
After the conversion the software didn’t want to start up all the services (which we later figured out could be software related because of the need for specific configuration of a local administrator account). When it seemed the conversion failed we shut down the VM and booted the physical machine. After adding that computer to the domain again (because the new VM uses the same computer account) all the services started up nicely. We will retry this conversion at a later date.
What we have learned:
- After a failed conversion you need to put the original server into the domain again. This requires rebooting the machine so you can’t do this during operating hours (at least we can’t).
- Because of the above point we will only LiveTransfer machines out of office hours. So while LiveTransfer is a nice option it gets you into trouble anyway if a conversion fails
- We will put a small DHCP scope into our Server VLAN so we don’t have to use a different VLAN during the migration
Documenting a virtualization project 