Physical-to-Virtual

Physical-to-Virtual ("P2V") describes the process of decoupling and migrating a physical server's operating system (OS), applications, and data from a physical server to a virtual machine guest hosted on a virtualized platform.

1 Methods of P2V migration
2 See also
3 External links

Methods of P2V migration

Manual P2V

User manually creates a virtual machine in a virtual host environment and copies all the files from OS, applications and data from the source machine.

Semi-automated P2V

Performing a P2V migration using a tool that assists the user in moving the servers from physical state to virtual machine.

Microsoft's Virtual Server Migration Toolkit
VMware provides a semi-automated tool called VMware Converter for moving physical servers into virtual environments. Converter replaces two older utilities: Importer (bundled with VMware Workstation) and P2V Assistant.
Oracle's Virtual Box has a Linux-based tool which allows you to convert a dd image of an existing hard drive
Microsoft provides the SysInternals disk2vhd utility for making images from Windows XP or later systems to be used with Windows Virtual PC, Microsoft Virtual Server or Hyper-V.
openQRM is an Open Source datacenter management platform that does P2V (and V2P, V2V or P2P).
Storix's bare-metal recovery product (System Backup Administrator) provides P2V and V2P capabilities for Linux, AIX, and Solaris.

Fully automated P2V

Performing a P2V migration using a tool that migrates the server over the network without any assistance from the user.

vContinuum vContinuum by InMage systems is an automated P2V data protection/migration tool
Symantec System Recovery enables fast, automated P2V and V2P conversions
Quest vConverter is an example of a fully automated migration tool for P2V.
System Center Virtual Machine Manager SCVMM among many other capabilities has P2V capability.
AutoVirt AutoMove automates the process of migrating data from physical to virtual machines without client disruption.
Leostream is an example of a fully automated migration tool for P2V.
PlateSpin Migrate is an example of a fully automated migration tool for P2V.
Virtuozzo contains automatic P2V (and V2P) migration tools.

External links

Manual physical-to-virtual migration description for OpenVZ