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5.2.4. Create the bootable media
P2V uses bootable media to create a bootable image of the hard drive of a physical machine and send it to the conversion server for import into a hypervisor. You will need a Red Hat subscription to download the rhel-6.x-p2v.iso ISO. Follow the instructions on preparing bootable media from the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Installation Guide. Note that there is only one ISO image for both i386 and x86_64 architectures.
The latest release of rhel-6.x-p2v.iso can be found at https://rhn.redhat.com/rhn/channels/PackageList.do?filter_string=virt-p2v&cid=10508. The ISO file will be installed in
/usr/share/virt-p2v/.
Create the appropriate bootable media:
The rhel-6.x-p2v.iso file can be used three ways: as a bootable disk, a PXE boot image, and as a bootable USB device.
- Burn the ISO to a blank CD-ROM or DVD-ROM, and insert it into the disk drive of the physical machine that is to be converted. To boot properly from this boot media, some changes to BIOS settings may be required to ensure that the optical disk drive is first in the boot order.
- Use the ISO to create a bootable USB media. To boot properly from this boot media, some changes to BIOS settings may be required to ensure that the USB device is first in the boot order. In addition, some BIOSes do not support booting from USB media. The P2V client disk image is approximately 100 MB, so the USB device must be large enough to hold the disk image.
- Prepare a PXE Boot image for your existing PXE server. To boot from PXE, some changes to BIOS settings may be required to ensure that the PXE boot is first in the boot order.
More information about creating boot media can be found in Appendix A, Additional procedures.
You have finished preparing and are now ready to move on to converting a physical machine to a virtual machine.
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