Migrating Physical Servers and Virtual Machines
to Hyper-V Virtual Machines
For most organizations today, virtualization is a technology that is established in the
environment, and the number of operating systems deployed to bare-metal hardware
(physical servers) is decreasing. It’s more likely today that you have operating systems
virtualized on another hypervisor, such as VMware ESXi or Citrix XenServer. Moving
from either a physical server or another hypervisor requires a migration known as
physical-to-virtual (P2V) or virtual-to-virtual (V2V).
In the previous version of SCVMM, SCVMM 2012, the P2V feature was built into the
product and allowed a physical server operating system to be captured and converted
to a virtual machine. This worked in an online or offline mode, depending on the
operating system running on the server. Online P2V is used for operating systems that
support the Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) and works by deploying an
agent to the physical computer operating system (although this could also be an
operating system running inside a VM). A capture of the hardware configuration is
performed and mapped to a virtual machine configuration, and then the content of the
hard drives is captured using a VSS backup, which ensures the integrity of the backup,
and is written to a VHD on the Hyper-V host. It is important that the application is
stopped during this process because, otherwise, once the backup is used with a virtual
machine on Hyper-V, any subsequent changes on the physical host would be lost. This
is not a problem if the application does not store application data or state locally.
Because of the VSS requirement, the online P2V is available for Windows XP SP2 and
Windows 2003 SP1 and above.
For Windows 2000 SP4 machines that don’t support VSS, or for other operating
systems that perhaps you don’t want to use online P2V with because a VSS writer for
the application is not available, an offline P2V is performed. With the offline P2V, a
Windows PE OS is temporarily installed on the source server, and the computer is
rebooted into the Windows PE environment through a modification to the boot
record. The VMM agent in the Windows PE environment captures the disk content
and streams to the Hyper-V server; and after that’s complete, the machine boots back
into the regular operating system, the final P2V processes are completed, and the
actual VM is created on the Hyper-V host.
This feature has been removed in SCVMM 2012 R2, which does leave a gap in the
ability to perform P2V with SCVMM. This gap, however, was (and still is) filled with
the Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter tool, which at the time of writing is at
version 3 and available from www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?
id=42497. MVMC has the ability to perform both P2V and V2V from VMware to
Hyper-V and to Azure. Recently, MVMC was retired as announced at
https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/scvmm/2016/06/04/important-update-
regarding-microsoft-virtual-machine-converter-mvmc/. This is because Microsoft has