Introduction

Your overall goal is to consolidate that server room full of hardware into a more easily managed and less expensive to operate and maintain integrated system. Some of your current mission-critical servers may be hosted on older hardware that can t be, or are difficult to be, replaced. Virtualization is the answer, but how do you achieve this goal?

What Is a P2V?

A key component when building a virtual infrastructure is establishing a physical to virtual (P2V) migration process. As a guideline, the do no harm mantra is a very important concept when performing P2V migrations. What this means is that your source physical server should not be damaged in any way during your P2V process. This permits a fail-back strategy if the P2V does not complete for whatever reason. Some commercial P2V methods add directories into the file system and entries into the Registry. These changes remain, especially if the P2V process does not complete or fails, and can render the source physical server inoperable. No tool you use should ever cause harm to the original server, but amazingly there are tools that do exactly that and yet are out there gaining market share today.

Whether your P2V is successful or not, your original physical server must remain intact with no harm done. Again, you may need to go back to the original server for more reasons than you thought.

For example, suppose the physical server you P2V is a critical production server and you are creating a...