It’s been a while since I’ve had time to post, but I couldn’t keep this to myself:
From the VMware vCenter Converter 4.2 for vCenter Server 4.1 Release Notes:
What’s New
The VMware vCenter Converter 4.2 is a substantial upgrade from vCenter Converter 4.1 and includes the following new functionality (previously found only in vCenter Converter Standalone 4.0.x):
Physical to virtual machine conversion support for Linux sources including:
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1, 3.0, 4.0, and 5.0
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 8.0, 9.0, 10.0, and 11.0
Ubuntu 5.x, 6.x, 7.x, and 8.x
This sounds too good to be true. I upgraded my lab environment and confirmed: you can now do scheduled Linux P2V.
The lab setup was ESX 4.1, vCenter 4.1, and vCenter Converter 4.2 for vCenter Server with a RHEL4.7 AS server imported.