is there a PtoV tool for hyper-v

[blade1000]

All-

I installed Hyper-V R2 2008 core server, works great and love the features.. managing it via another hyper-v (role based) server.. also great..

is there a PtoV tool somewhere I'm missing here? would like to vm afew physical servers for backup purposes?

or do I need VMM thru System Center 07 as my only option?

thanks for any help
blade

 

[58sniper]

System Center Virtual Machine Manager provides this feature. It's not (AFAIK) a feature in Hyper-V.

Pat Richard MVP
Plan for performance, and capacity takes care of itself. Plan for capacity, and suffer poor performance.

http://www.ucblogs.net/blogs/exchange/

 

[kmcferrin]

It is not a feature of Hyper-V, it is a feature of System Center Virtual Machine Manager. And SCVMM 2007 will not convert to Hyper-V VMs, you will need SCVMM 2008/2008 R2.

The only other option (that isn't really an option) is to use the SysInternals Disk2VHD tool. This will create a copy of your server's hard disk in a VHD file that can then be presented to a Hyper-V VM. The problem is that because it hasn't gone through a true P2V process all of the device drivers and configurations for the previous physical hardware will still be present (as opposed to the drivers for the virtual hardware), so in order to get it to run you will have to uninstall/replace a lot of the hardware drivers. Sometimes this works well, sometimes not.

________________________________________
CompTIA A+, Network+, Server+, Security+
MCTS:Windows 7
MCTS:Hyper-V
MCTS:System Center Virtual Machine Manager
MCSE:Security 2003
MCITP:Enterprise Administrator

 

[itsp1965]

I just read about Disk2VHD a sysinternals tool which allows you to convert a physical image to MS .VHD disk format.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/ee656415.aspx

 

[cajuntank]

Ok, has anyone used this yet that can comment? Pat's got me interested on this topic from another thread.

 

[kmcferrin]

I haven't used the Disk2VHD because I have SCVMM instead, but last week Mark Russinovich mentioned that he has updated Disk2VHD to swap out the HAL after conversion. This should alleviate many of the BSOD issues you would get from using it as a P2V tool, though you would still need to replace device drivers and install integration tools.

________________________________________
CompTIA A+, Network+, Server+, Security+
MCTS:Windows 7
MCTS:Hyper-V
MCTS:System Center Virtual Machine Manager
MCSE:Security 2003
MCITP:Enterprise Administrator

 

[58sniper]

SCVMM would still be a better solution. Not only is it designed to do P2V, but gives you complete VM management capabilities.

Pat Richard MVP
Plan for performance, and capacity takes care of itself. Plan for capacity, and suffer poor performance.

http://www.ucblogs.net/blogs/exchange/

 

[cajuntank]

I just got finished a few hours ago trying out the disk2vhd utility to move my BES from a dedicated machine to a VM under Hyper-V. So far, so good. I of course have the other machine off so my SRI's don't conflict from BES, but everything has been working off of the new VM. I'll keep my other machine offline for the next day or two, just to make sure, but this seems to have worked very nicely.