Note: This is a guest post by Rory McCune (@raesene) from ScotSTS. If you would like to contribute to the Security Roots blog, contact us.

One of the useful features of having Dradis Pro as a virtual machine is that it’s relatively easy to move from one place to another. One query that’s been made a couple of times on the mailing lists is whether it’s possible to migrate the Dradis Pro VM onto a VMWare ESXi host.

Luckily this seems to be a relatively straightforward process and hopefully if you follow the instructions below, your migration should be painless. These notes were tested with a VMWare ESXi 4.1 host.

Step 1 – Download and install the VMware vCenter Converter Standalone 5.0 from:

http://downloads.vmware.com/d/details/converter5/dHclYnRqZEBiZEAldw==

There are a number of ways to migrate VMs from Workstation to ESXi, but this one seems to work fairly well and the download is free for registered users.

Step 2 – During the installation choose the “local” option (as opposed to client/server)

Step 3 – Start the Converter and choose the “Convert Machine” option

Step 4 – This should bring up the conversion wizard. The source type you’re looking for is “VMWare Workstation or other VMware virtual machine” (which should be the default). Use the browse feature to go to the directory that your Dradis Pro virtual machine is installed in and select the .vmx file, open it and then click next.

Step 5 – This should bring up the Destination System page. Here we need to choose a destination type of “VMware Infrastructure virtual machine” and fill in the credentials for the ESXi host and click next.

Step 6 – This should bring up the “Destination Virtual Machine” page. Pick a name for your VM and click next

 
Step 7 – This should take you to the “Destination Location” page. On this page you should choose the appropriate data store on your ESXi host and click next.

Step 8 – At this point you should get an options page. Change any items necessary for your install and click next to the summary page. This should provide the information for the conversion. Check that it’s all as expected and click the Finish button to start the conversion.

Step 9 – The time taken for the conversion will depend on network bandwidth and processing power of the machine your running it on. On my test system it took about 5 minutes to convert an empty instance of the VM.

Step 10 – Once the conversion has completed you can use the vSphere client (or VMWare Workstation 8) to start up the VM. Once it’s started you can find the IP address that’s in use by looking at the console (it should be above the login prompt)

Step 11 – Navigate to the URL mentioned and if all is well you should see the familiar Dradis Pro login page.