VMware P to V of RHEL5 with multiple partitions

Hello All,

So I am going to be converting 2 Physical RHEL 5 servers to VM's  and had a few questions

1. The physical box was configured with multiple mounts / luns I would like to simplify this if possible on the VM side by having everything reside under / like all the other VM's in our environment are.

is there a way to do this during the P to V conversion??

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on

/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00

                      365G  6.2G  340G   2% /

/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol05

                      3.9G  156M  3.6G   5% /home

/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol04

                      5.9G  3.7G  1.9G  66% /var

/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol03

                      3.9G  137M  3.6G   4% /tmp

/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol02

                      7.8G  2.9G  4.5G  40% /usr

/dev/sda3             194M   19M  166M  10% /boot

tmpfs                 3.9G     0  3.9G   0% /dev/shm

I would like to clean this up and just have everything under /

2. Can I run the converter on a live system? or do I need to stop all services / applications that are running on it before I proceed??

Thank you all for any and all help.

Paul.