[Leaplist] vmware serial number

[Mark W. Alexander]

On Wed, Feb 21, 2007 at 02:26:12PM -0500, Dan Cherry wrote:
> Hi,
> I'd like to migrate my vmware from one physical Linux box to another.  I plan 
> to re-install vmware server, then copy the windows OS partition, as I believe 
> that will be in tact.  However, long story short... the 20 digit serial 
> number was lost in a text file when a drive died.
> 
> Should I re-register, or is the number retrievable from the running vmware (if 
> so, where)?

VMWare has a couple free products now, so re-registering is pretty trivial.
Since I've been doing some virtualization reviews, I've gotten several
different products from free-beer to eval only with no hassle from VMWare. (Too
little, in fact... They _lost_ points in my eval by not responding to
evaluation support questions.)

You can probably continue just fine using the free vmplayer application from
http://news.cnet.co.uk/desktops/0,39029662,49287907,00.htm

Assuming by "Windows OS partition" you mean an existing VMWare image, it should
read your existing .vmx file and go.

If you are talking about a real Windows physical disk partition, then you're
going to have to get a bit more creative. (I seem to recall doing that with
VMWare some time ago... Don't have much need for a dedicated Windows partition
anymore :) QEMU provides a utility `qemu-image` that converts to and from a
variety of emulated disk files. I _think_ it can convert from a physical disk
image (as "raw") but I haven't tried. You'll probably have more issues with
Windows seeing all the hardware as different than with actually converting the
disk image.

A good overview of this process is at
http://news.cnet.co.uk/desktops/0,39029662,49287907,00.htm

For extra fun, get a hardware VT enabled box and run Windows under KVM - QEMU
with a kernel module that provides hardware virtualization. I installed Windows
2003 Server under KVM at work so our developers can RDP to a Windows desktop to
view sites in IE.

mwa
-- 
Mark W. Alexander
slash at dotnetslash.net

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