Physical-to-Virtual

Physical-to-Virtual ("P2V") describes the process of decoupling and migrating a physical server's OS, applications, and data from a physical server to a virtual machine guest hosted on a virtualized platform.

Methods of P2V migration

Manual P2V

• User manually creates a virtual machine in a virtual host environment and copies all the files from OS, applications and data from the source machine.

Semi-automated P2V

• Performing a P2V migration using a tool that assists the user in moving the servers from physical state to virtual machine, such as Microsoft's Virtual Server Migration Toolkit
• VMware provides a semi-automated tool called VMware Converter for moving physical servers into virtual environments. Converter replaces two older utilities: Importer (bundled with VMware Workstation) and P2V Assistant.

Fully automated P2V

• Performing a P2V migration using a tool that migrates the server over the network without any assistance from the user.
• System Center Virtual Machine Manager SCVMM among many other capabilities has P2V capability.
• AutoVirt AutoMove automates the process of migrating data from physical to virtual machines without client disruption.
• Leostream is an example of a fully automated migration tool for P2V.
• PlateSpin PowerConvert is an example of a fully automated migration tool for P2V.
• Virtuozzo contains automatic P2V (and V2P) migration tools.
• Vizioncore vConverter is an example of a fully automated migration tool for P2V.

External links

• Manual physical-to-virtual migration description for OpenVZ