Tuesday, March 25, 2014

You wanted to P2V?

Went to convert an old physical server to a virtual machine and I discovered that the latest version of System Center Virtual Machine Manager, 2012 R2, removed the P2V (physical to virtual) conversion tool.

What's recommended by the Microsoft Virtual Machine Engineering blog is to use an older version of VMM - 2012 SP1 or older - to complete your P2V needs.
http://blogs.technet.com/b/scvmm/archive/2013/10/03/how-to-perform-a-p2v-in-a-scvmm-2012-r2-environment.aspx

Alternatively, you can use the SysInternals Disk2vhd tool to manually P2V.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/ee656415.aspx

I ended up using the Disk2vhd tool and was successful in converting my server to a virtual machine.

Before I began converting the physical disks to virtual:
  • Stopped any programs or services that may have been running (as memory is not going to be captured)
  • Disabled any services running from automatically starting. Once you boot it up and reconfigure your network adapters and drive letters, set the services back to boot Manual or Automatic.
Then, I launched the Disk2vhd tool and captured the disks (one VHD disk with both the system reserve and the C: system volumes, and another VHD disk with the D: data volume).
    Note: The Disk2vhd tool default converts disks to VHDX, but that's only compatible in Server 2012 and above. I had to uncheck the [Use VHDX] check box, since the virtual machine was going on a Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V host.
The only left to do after converting the system's disks where:
  • Write down the system's network information (easiest with ipconfig /all in the command prompt)
  • Convert the VHD files created from 'Dynamically Size' vhd disks to 'Fixed Size' vhd disks
  • Attach the VHD disk files to a blank virtual machine with the necessary specifications (Processors, Memory, Network Adapters, etc) The disk containing the system volume needs to be connected to the Virtual Machine's IDE 0 or 1 Controller
  • Shutdown the phsyical machine
  • Boot up the virtual machine
  • Loaded the Hyper-V Guest OS Utilities (Hyper-V Integration Services)
  • Set the network adapters back to the correct configuration
  • Set the drive letters back to the proper designations (in my case D: became E:)
  • Re-enable the Services that were disabled 
  • Re-activate Windows Operating System

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