Virtual to physical converter vmware

Only VMware vCenter Converter Standalone is considered in this blog post and sometimes can be referred to simply as VMware Converter for more convenience.

Hot migration is the process of converting a machine that is in the powered-on state. Hot migration is not recommended for converting Active Directory Domain Controllers.

It is highly recommended that you stop all possible applications and services that write data on disks before starting hot migration. Cold migration is the migration of a source machine that is in the powered-off state. Cold migration is recommended for converting MS Exchange servers, database servers such as Oracle or MS SQL, and other servers on which data is dynamically changed when a server is powered on to preserve the data consistency.

If the data on disks remains static, you can perform hot migration. Cold migration of physical servers can be performed if you boot from the live CD and run the process of converting a physical machine including disks drives and the operating system. In the current example, VMware Converter 6.

The source physical machine is running Windows Server Step 1: Source System. Select a source machine. Since a physical Windows Server must be converted, select Powered on , select Remote Windows machine as the source type, and specify the IP address or DNS name, the user name, and password. Then, hit View source details. VMware vCenter Converter Standalone agent must be deployed on the remote Windows machine in this case.

You should select whether to uninstall the agent files when import succeeds automatically or not. Then, hit Yes to continue. Once the agent is installed, you can view source details. Notice that VMware Converter 6. Hit Close , then hit Next in the Source System window.

Step 2: Destination System. As a physical machine running Windows Server used in this example must be converted to a VM running on an ESXi host, VMware Infrastructure virtual machine must be selected in VMware Converter for this step; select the destination server. Step 3: Destination Virtual Machine. Step 4: Destination Location. Select the ESXi host, cluster or resource pool that is connected to the selected Datacenter and select the datastore available on that ESXi host.

There must be enough free space on the selected datastore. If the modern operating system is installed on a source machine, you can select the latest available virtual machine version hardware version for the destination VM. The virtual machine version that can be selected also depends on a version of the destination ESXi host.

Step 5: Options. This step allows you to select the following options for the destination VM:. Data to copy. Select which disks and volumes you want to copy. You can select thick or thin provisioning type for destination virtual disks you should select advanced view and resize volumes if needed.

In this example, a physical disk that contains two volumes is converted to a thin provisioned virtual disk. It is recommended that you tick the checkboxes:. You can select the number of virtual processors, processor cores, virtual disk controllers, and memory size. Select networks to which virtual network adapters of the VM must be connected. On the Source Services tab, you can select which running services on the source Windows machine to stop before starting P2V conversion with VMware Converter.

On the Destination Services tab, you can select the startup mode for services on the destination VM. Advanced options. There are two tabs — Synchronize and Post-conversion. In the Post-conversion tab, you can set the power state for a source machine and destination machine after P2V conversion is finished. The Post-conversion processing options are:. Throttling allows you to perform your usual tasks during the conversion process. Step 6: Summary.

Check your settings for the new machine conversion job you created and if everything is correct, click Finish to start conversion in VMware Converter. After machine conversion is started, wait until the conversion process is fully completed. The time needed for conversion depends on the amount of data stored on the source machine disks and network speed. Now that a Windows machine is converted, power on the destination VM if you have not selected to power on the VM automatically during conversion job creation.

As you recall, in our example we have selected to install VMware Tools on the destination virtual machine automatically. My plan was to create a disaster recovery server by either virtualizing all the current physical machine and have VMWare images of it and restore via this method. The other method was to create a brand spanking new install of an OS image and transfer it over to a physical one via this method. So it's more like a chu-chu train production line.

As stating above, the process of transferring the image back to a physical drive is super long dependin on the disk space setup along with data, if any. Virtualizing a physical machine is of the same time consuming process as well. Easy really if it's a 'buntu OS on vmware just share a folder with the host, install ubuntu imager. I'm using workstation player I'm not seeing it.

Figured it out Needed to hit escape in the vmware loading screen "once" for boot menu. This feature is only available to subscribers. Get your subscription here. Log in or Sign up. Suggested articles. Thank you, this helped us quite a bit! Hello, saw your post and hoping you could assist me with a question.

Thank you for your time and assistance. Worked perfectly. So simple when you know how :- Thanks a bunch indeed! Hi there, I just wanted to follow the above-mentioned procedure with one change in detail. By: Giuseppe Proietti. Regards, Kiran,. Regards, Vendhan. There are no dates on here so not sure how old this is but the link can help you. Very good and functional. Thank you very much.

So can someone clarify if the following is correct: So basically-download Clonezilla ISO from their site.