Converting a Symantec LiveState/BESR image to a VMware Workstation virtual machine

I recently had the need to convert a physical server into a virtual server for testing purposes. I had a Symantec LiveState image taken (a .s2vi file) from the server (Symantec has recently chosen to rename LiveState to Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery or BESR), and wanted to run this machine as a virtual one inside VMware Workstation 5.5.

VMware has the option to directly open a LiveState image as a virtual disk, but the Windows Server 2003 machine of which the image was taken refused to boot very early in the boot process, and thus I wasn't able to run it virtually. I suspect that this was because of the Adaptec RAID disks in use on the server.

However, I found a solution to this problem by using the VMware's tool called VMware Virtual Machine Importer (about which I blogged previously). This utility is a bit hard to find, since it lives in the following directory:

C:\Program Files\Common Files\VMware\VMware Virtual Machine Importer

Yes, this tool installs with VMware Workstation, but there's no icon in the Start menu, for example. Nonetheless, if you have Workstation 5.5, you have this tool, called v2vapp.exe. There's a PDF document available for this utility.

I used this tool to convert the LiveState image into a VMware virtual disk, and converting the 8 gigabyte image took about an hour. After the conversion, VMware asked whether I'd like to update the BusLogic SCSI drivers to LSI SCSI drivers, but I declined. Even so, the virtual machine now run nicely, and thus the problem was solved.