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I am trying to convert a physical server 2003 server to a virtual machine.

I am using System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 (Workgroup Edition) on a Microsoft Server 2008 R2 Data center edition hyper-v server.

Is it possible to do a test P2V with SCVMM without disrupting the production server? If so, how?

Brett Larson
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1 Answers1

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Perform the conversion as you normally would just connect the resulting VM to a private network in hyper-v and don't tell scvmm to power off the production server.

This will give you an isolated VM will all of the functionality of your production environment without doing anything more than slowing down the server while its being virtualized.

I wouldn't recommend doing this during the heaviest part of the day as P2V operations are fairly hardware (mostly disk/network) intense.

ErnieTheGeek
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  • Ernie, thanks. I was able to do this successfully. One thing to note is that the "Conversion Options" are very easy to skip over. [This image shows the tiny tiny thing you must select high lighted in yellow.](http://thelazyadmin.com/images/offline-p2v/offline-p2v-5.png) – Brett Larson Nov 01 '12 at 21:12
  • Exactly! I couldn't remember where exactly the switch was without looking. – ErnieTheGeek Nov 01 '12 at 21:31
  • The disk and network intensity of the SCVMM conversion is rather limited as it seems to be [dog slow on any of my tests](http://serverfault.com/questions/357571/scvmm-p2v-conversion-slow). – the-wabbit Dec 12 '12 at 12:56
  • Really? I haven't had any real noticeable slowdowns on it. I've done about 50ish conversions on machines averaging about 150GB, total time was about 3 hours per machine, give or take a bit, on a gigabit network. – ErnieTheGeek Dec 18 '12 at 15:29