Virtualisation of Physical GeoSCADA Servers (P2V)

[Shane85]

Has anyone ever used the Vmware standalone physical-to-virtual conversion tool to convert a physical GeoSCADA server into a Virtual Copy (Virtual Machine)? If so, are there any considerations to factor?

[JChamberlain1]

Should be fine so long as the server isn't running at the time.

[BevanWeiss]

As Jesse said 'should be fine' 🙂
There's not much to lose in trying.  You'd still have the physical box to fall back to if it doesn't work.

One item that might be a little tricky is around certain license characteristics.  When you virtualise, things like HDD VolumeID should stay the same, but CPU ID, Network Adapter MAC ID etc will change.  And these are often mashed together to form the unique ID for any softkey licensing.

I've used the P2V for a few other software platforms, but not GeoSCADA.  I'd generally say that for GeoSCADA you're probably better off just installing it from scratch, and migrating the data.  GeoSCADA has a 'clean' installation and configuration environment, unlike other SCADA platforms that require arcane magic and hand waving to get them working right.
Doing this would also give you a good opportunity to upgrade your GeoSCADA versioning.  Since you could keep your existing physical server as your existing version.  Spin up a new virtual on latest OS, and latest GeoSCADA, then do some offline testing, then fail over your physical box, connect up your new virtual box and do more thorough testing... if it all goes bad, you can always shut down the virtual server, and spin back up the physical.