I figured I would ask before I built a test environment to try this out.
I have a physical server that has a somewhat large amount of physical storage. It is running SQL and would prefer to do a cold migration over a hot migration to ensure I don't have data consistency issues.
My question is, does free space transfer very quickly during the migration process or does it literally do a bit for bit copy? The storage has 600GB of physical space and just under 200GB of it is used.
I do not have a large period of time where I could take it down. Obviously one option is to build a separate SQL server and migrate the databases one at a time but for now let's focus on the P2V question regarding how empty space is transferred.