The box I have been hosting the blog on had got to its last proverbial leg as of late; hanging about every 12 hours or less. So, I decided to move the whole thing over to another box. I’m already in the middle of another project to eventually host the blog at a real location, but that’s still in the works and not ready yet. Not wanting to go to the trouble to configure WordPress and everything on another box just temporarily, I decided to give the VMware Converter a try and move the entire box into a VM image on a more stable computer at my apartment.
So far, I’m pretty pleased with the results; it took only a couple of minutes to install the converter and start the conversion process (which took about 1.5 hrs total to complete). Surprisingly enough, the thing mostly just worked out of the box after being VM-ized; I had to install VMware Tools, and reconfigure network settings a bit, but other than that, the whole experience was rather seamless.
For now, the blog should be a bit more stable (now living as a VM on a relatively new and, ah, higher quality tower server that I recently acquired to run most of the services for my apartment).
And as far as VMware Converter goes, color me impressed; I expected to run into a lot of snags, but the user experience was quite good. Definitely a great timesaver for retiring old, failing hardware without having to go through the trouble of reconstructing a new install to perform the tasks of the old one.