> I’m sure I can convert it to a VM, but I can’t bring myself to do it, because I would have to briefly take it down for the ‘P2V’ conversion.
Maybe in the future ESX will be able to migrate a running physical machine to a running virtual machine.
You can easily do that now using 'VMware Converter'. You point the app at a running physical box, and it will convert it into a VM. I still don't want to use it on that particular Linux machine, because it would interrupt my uptime. Even using the Converter, you still have to bring down live and bring up the VM, which is about as quick as a reboot, but it still breaks uptime. lol