DATAPUISTOKEMISTI

Short version: Not as simple as you thought.

VMware Converter does decent job converting old physical servers to virtual machines, but it refuses to do anything to servers using software RAID. I really don't get why such arbitary limitation is in place. It really doesn't matter if physical server used RAID, software or not, because everything is copied by Converter on file lever rather than block level.

To prefer IPv4 (A) addresses over IPv6 (AAAA) on CentOS 6 you need to add new file named /etc/gai.conf with following content. Last line is what controls if IPv4 or IPv6 should be tried first.

I had unfortunate opportunity to play with RedHat / Fedora / CentOS distribution today. I have to say that as much as I hate Ubuntu, CentOS is even worse than it was few years ago when CentOS5 was still current. And now we're ignoring RHEL7 / CentOS7 where headless server installer requires GUI that's optimized for touch screen and tries to imitate Ipad. Recommended solution? Use VNC to connect installer. Aargh! I should probably have Ipad to run that VNC client - for improved user experience you know.

For 32-bit source to 64-bit see my older post . Old install was using software RAID-1, but did not have LVM. Small 200MB /boot partition, 8GB swap and rest as one root partition. We're redoing it completely so what it used to be doesn't really matter. All existing data on root will be lost.

Pretty much any Linux should be fine as long as you have suitable scratch partition for temp Ubuntu install, in this example we're re-using 6GB swap partition. Process is two step, first we do minimal 32-bit Ubuntu install over swap partition, boot system, hack it to 64-bit and finally do final 64-bit Ubuntu install over old CentOS rootfs.

Did P2V for old CentOS 5.5 i686 install and it failed to boot. Recreating initrd helped. Also see thread on VMware support forums .