VMM 2008 P2V To Hyper-V Of DL360G5

I’ve used a "security server" running DL360’s with WSUS and AV in several jobs now.  They’re great candidates for virtualisation so the security server at work was my first target to convert to a virtual machine, thus freeing up some h/w for profit making.

The P2V process of VMM 2008 is pretty easy.  I found no fault with it.  However, I did have some problems that were non-VMM 2008 related.

The VM would hang on boot up.  I got it into safe mode and disabled the HP services.  They were trying to access hardware that didn’t exist.  Ideally you would uninstall this stuff before P2V but I needed to keep the physical machine online until the virtual was ready.

Once the VM was ready I installed the integration components in VMM 2008.  I fired up the VM and tried to log in … uh oh!  It needed to be reactivated.  Luckily I’d put the machine on a test network with Internet access so that was done.  Then I had a service failure pop-up.  The event log showed that was OK, the server was looking for the domain and not finding it … it’s still on the test network while the physical machine is still providing services.

Now the killer.  I got a pop up about WMIPRVSE failing.  That repeated 9 times when I closed it.  I also had dozens of WINMGMT errors in the application log.  To troubleshoot I made a checkpoint and started googling and trying things out.  In the end here’s what it came down to:

• Uninstall anything related to HP.
• Edit the registry and searched for anything to do with HPWBEM.  I deleted the relevant keys/values.  Some needed to be edited instead of deleted.  This took ages!
• Searched for HP services in CurrentControlSetServices.  They weren’t removed by uninstall’s.
• Rebooted
• Removed HP folders from Program Files.
• Uninstalled the OpsMgr agent (I wasn’t taking chances now – because I was still getting the error after reboots).
• Removed the ATI driver which I’d forgotten to remove.
• I reset the WMI repository.
• After a reboot the WMI errors disappeared.

As I said, the P2V worked perfectly.  Any problems were related to the HP software, e.g. not uninstalling correctly.  There seemed to be loads that needed to be done.  I’d tried lots of combinations in various attempts by restoring the checkpoint.  Looking back on it, I doubt the OpsMgr agent was a factor but I removed it anyway in case it was doing some heavy WMI stuff that was no longer applicable.

CAUTION: Edit the registry at your own risk.  I’m not recommending it.  It’s just what I did to solve my problem.  If you screw up your server then it’s your problem, not mine.