Ubuntu – How to move a standalone Ubuntu Server to an virtual server (ESXi)

When rebooting after a crash, ESX usually creates a vmkernel-zdump file in the /root home directory. This is a compressed file that has an image of core and a chunk of the /var/log/vmkernel log file. The first thing to do is get the log file from this dump file

[root] vmkdump -l vmkernel-zdump-101409.14.18.1
created file vmkernel-log.1

and look at the last few lines to see if you can get any hints from the last log entries or the stack trace.

1. You can save a fair amount (~20-50%) but mixing between XP/Vista and W7 won't help - try to stick to one if you care about page sharing.
2. I'd go for more cores myself, certainly if it's closer to 50 than 20 - think about a dual-CPU box, either Xeon 56xx or AMD Magny-Cours.
3. DON'T try to do this with even the most enterprise-oriented SSDs, not unless you like rebuilding and restoring your systems. Bad idea, morris-dancing-bad in fact.
4. I think you mean VMWare View - it's designed specifically for what you're doing and works very well indeed - costs though.
5. Yes, either use fast centralised storage (i.e. FC or 10Gbps iSCSI) or if you want to do this with local disks then use a minimum of 4 disks in a hardware RAID 10 configuration, ideally 10krpm ones too.

Hope this helps but you probably want to get a few people's opinions too - that's the benefit of this site - varied experiences :)