Fresh off the production line, a P2V tool by Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell, formerly of Sysinternals.
The tool is called Disk2Vhd and this is the 1.0 offering, and is now part of the Sysinternals Suite.
Disk2vhd is a utility that creates VHD (Virtual Hard Disk - Microsoft’s Virtual Machine disk format) versions of physical disks for use in Microsoft Virtual PC or Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs). The difference between Disk2vhd and other physical-to-virtual tools is that you can run Disk2vhd on a system that’s online.
This assumes “other” tools require you to power down the system you wish to create an image of. I guess this sounds reasonable to expect, and since I haven’t used either tool yet, I am not one to make a judgment call.
I am turning my old Dell 600SC server into a virtual host exclusively and in doing so I need to P2V it and store that image on my new NAS and then host it virtually amongst other environments I plan to add. These tools are now a critical component of that plan and my plan is to write a post about the process and results once I get to doing it.
Subscribe