I recently converted a physical CentOS 5 server to a virtual machine on VMWare ESXi 4.0. After the process completed successfully, I was elated since I have several similar servers that must be converted. I was not looking forward to the prospect of reinstalling each server manually and moving data manually. However, my elation quickly turned to dismay when I tried to turn on the newly created virtual machine and only got an empty black screen with a white cursor in the corner on the console. Here are the steps I took to resolve the issue:
1. Boot the virtual machine to a CentOS install disk.
2. At the first prompt, type “linux rescue” (without the quotes) to boot into rescue mode.
3. Follow the prompts to get to a rescue mode command prompt – no need for networking.
4. Issue the command “chroot /mnt/sysimage” to change the system root to the system installed on hard drives.
5. Issue the command “grub-install sda” to re-install the bootloader.
6. Disconnect the install disk image from the virtual machine.
7. Reboot the virtual server and be elated again as it boots into CentOS 5.
How did you convert the physical CentOS into virtual machine?
With VMWare VCenter Converter Standalone.