ESX server and IDE

waelaltaqi · 11-25-2008, 10:17 PM

I had to visualize two physical servers (debian 2.0.x and Fedora 6) into VMware ESX. The servers run on two small IDE drives. I imaged the servers using Acronis and took the images to a remote location.I imported the acronis image using VMware convertor into the ESX server. When i boot up the debian vm, it shows the LILO splash and seems that LILO gets started but i get the following error message:

Code:

.
.
.
SCSI Subsystem initialized
pivot_root: No such file or directory
/sbin/init: 432: can not open /dev/console: No such file
Kernel Panic: Attempted to kill INIT

I learned very recently that ESX requires SCSI drives which i think is stupid since the company brags about how easy it is to upgrade from VMware server > ESX ... I have done many research and it seems that the problem is in INITRD ... seems that initrd image is does not have scsi modules to load virtual scsi controller ... It seems that loading the scsi modules needs to be done prior to imaging and requires recompiling the initrd image. That is a is a problem because the physical server not within reach at the present time. if i take the same acronis image and convert it into vmware server IDE disk, the VM boots up just fine which makes it clearly a scsi/ide issue.

Have anyone find a workaround?

Any help will be appreciated ....

waelaltaqi · 11-25-2008, 10:42 PM

Sorry ... i'm replying to myself but i think i found a link with good explanation. As i said, i was able to import the acronis images into VMware server and not to ESX ... that's because great VMware server supports IDE and expensive ESX does not....

Please look at the following link:
http://mindspill.net/computing/linux...or-vmware.html

From link, i need to compile SCSI support before imaging the server. I decided that i can boot up the IDE virtual machine ( the VMware Server vm) and try the link above then image it back with acronis then try to import it with ESX. Note that intitrd image is not a compressed image and called "initrd.img-2.6.8-2.386". I verified all steps and did the following:

Code:

cd /boot
mkdir /mnt/tmp
cp initrd.img-2.68-2.386 /tmp/initrd.ext2
mount -o loop /tmp/initrd.ext2 /mnt/initrd

I get this error:

Code:

ioctl: LOOP_CLR_FD: Device or resource busy
mount: you must specify filesystem type

Can someone explain?