P2V-ing old laptops is something I have mentioned in the past and had some success with. I’m a fan.

At the moment I am trying to P2V a four year old HP mini-notebook running XP onto my ESXi 1.5 lab environment using VMware converter. I’m not having much success. VMware Converter fails at different points, mostly around 2% but in one case it got to 24% before blue-screening.

I started by using my QNAP as a datastore but have given up on that as I don’t think it, or maybe my network, can cope. I could have experimented with throttling the bandwidth but its time, time, time. I’ve made some space on the locally attached storage of my ESXi host but without any immediate improvement.

I am running the converter locally and connecting to the new VC appliance. That itself is pretty fat and may be using too much resource itself so I may cut that out too.

Other things I need to try are slimming down the services running on the old machine. You know how stuff tends to build up like limescale on top of your OS.

Will keep posting my progress.

How about that, an actual post about P2V!