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Moving a physical server to Hyper-V

A few years ago I started using virtual machines for testing purposes and running none critical servers. All of these servers started there lives as a Virtual Machine. None of them have ever run on dedicated hardware. Last week we took a closer look at our dedicated servers and realized that some of them were more a sleep than awake. So we decided to virtualize these machines to Hyper-V.

At this point we came to the conclusion that Microsoft has no tools available to perform this action. Lucky for us we run in to a very nice tool named vConverter, that does a excellent job in making a vhd of a physical server. You can watch a demo of vConverter over here.

When you are going to convert a physical machine into a virtual machine consider the following:
1. Update your OS before converting
2. Write down your settings like IP addresses

That’s it. After conversion copy the fresh vhd to your Hyper-V server and create a new VM. Assign a existing vhd and point to the location where you copied the vhd file. After booting the VM insert the integration tools. The integration tools will update the HAL and install the appropriate drivers.

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