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Optimize your VMs by uninstalling physical hardware after P2V

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After your P2V one of those steps to do at first is the Installation of VMware Tools.

Also, not only you should get rid of all the physical hardware in Device manager that's not used any more but also those software packages which had been used on a physical server to manage the hardware (like HP's ILO , Fujitsu's ServerView, or Dell's OpenManage), or the soft that manages the RAID drives.

So first thing to do after you P2V and install VMware tools into your freshly converted VM is to show all deactivated hardware in Device Manager:

01. On your VM go to Start > RUN > CMD > Enter

02. Type “set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1”

cmd

03. While still in the command prompt window type: devmgmt.msc and then open Device Manager and click on the Menu go to View > Show Hidden Devices (like on the pic).

show-hidden-devices

Then you should see which devices are marked like ghosted devices.They are grayed out. Those devices you can safely remove from the device manager.


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About Vladan SEGET

This website is maintained by Vladan SEGET. Vladan is as an Independent consultant, professional blogger, vExpert x16, Veeam Vanguard x9, VCAP-DCA/DCD, ESX Virtualization site has started as a simple bookmarking site, but quickly found a large following of readers and subscribers.

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Comments

  2. PiroNet says

    I P2V'ed a server and once done it started to crash randomly on VMware… Of course ITM's were not happy, virtualization sux I could hear… After running that trick, the server ran like a charm, it happened to be a remaining piece of QLogic drivers that caused all the problems. Highly recommended after any P2V!

    Cheers,
    Didier

  3. Dimka says

    How it can be done on Windows 2003 Server as virtual machine?
    I've done like you describe, but I can't see any gray devices.

    • Vladan says

      If you don't see any “grayed” devices then everything went fine with the P2V conversion and you don't need to remove manually anything else. Just make sure uninstalling any software which is directly managing the physical server (like GUI RAID manager etc…)