My home server, Threepwood, named after the main character in the popular game series “Monkey Island”, has finally taken the step out of this world and into the virtual space.

For a few years it resided within a Compaq Proliant 400 with whooping 384MB of RAM and 450MHz CPU. Running Ubuntu Linux, this has actually been enough for most of the tasks. It has mainly been used to host a few blogs, my brother and mine, thus running Apache2, MySQL and PHP5.

Now that I’ve got VMware ESXi running, I decided it was time to move already. To move it I used VMware Converter, which can move physical machines into VMware ESX and ESXi while the source machine is online. To minimize data loss I stopped the Apache and MySQL services.

The conversion took about 1 hour, but then again I only had a 40GB hard drive, so times may vary depending on hard drive size and network capabilities.

After the conversion I took the time to upgrade the kernel and other packages. Until today my server had 294 days uptime, so one might say it was due for a new kernel. I also gave it some more memory to play with, 1596MB to be exact, and a 2.40GHz CPU.

Yeah, I know. I’m spoiling him.