
Select “This Local Machine” if you intend to migrate the physical machine to where VMware vCenter Conversion is installed. To perform a P2V migration in vCenter Converter Standalone, click “Convert Machine.” Select “Powered-on Machine” from the drop-down menu on the Source System tab.Ģ. In today’s article we’ll take a look at how to perform a hot P2V migration and a cold P2V migration. Cold migrations are initiated by booting VMware Converter from a disc.

During cold migrations, the physical computer itself is still running, but the operating system that is being cloned is inactive.

Cold migrations are ideal for systems like SQL servers and mail servers that have data that is regularly updated or altered.

Hot migrations are not recommended for certain tasks – like migrating Active Directory Domain Controllers into a virtual machine (this task should be performed during a cold migration) – but work well with systems where local data remains static.Ĭold migrations, on the other hand, occur while the source system is offline. Hot migrations are those which occur while the source system is in a running state. VMware vCenter Converter is capable of accomplishing both hot migrations and cold migrations. In part one of this series, you’ll learn how to do a P2V migration in part two, you’ll learn how to do V2V. But vCenter Converter is not limited to virtual machines created in VMware platforms it can also import and convert VMs created in competing software, such as Microsoft Virtual Server and Microsoft Hyper-V In a V2V migration, an existing virtual machine running on one virtualization platform is copied to a virtual machine running on another virtualization platform. In a P2V migration, the operating system running on a physical system is copied to a virtual machine. VCenter Converter performs both physical-to-virtual (P2V) and virtual-to-virtual (V2V) migrations. The application converts and packages a source system into a new virtual machine that can reside on an ESX/ESXi server. VMware vCenter Converter is an application developed to migrate systems. Fortunately, you can reduce the amount of time spent creating and configuring virtual machines by cloning and importing physical or virtual systems to your VMware ESX/ESXi server. Setting up the hardware parameters, installing the operating system, and then adding third-party applications to the OS can be a huge time sink. Building a virtual machine from scratch can take several hours.
