Online Physical to Virtual Migration

Online P2V migrations are possible with almost every Windows operating system that Hyper-V and SCVMM 2008 support, except Windows 2000 Server. During an online migration, an agent is copied to the source server, a VSS snapshot is taken, and that VSS snapshot is transferred over the network to a newly created virtual machine on the Hyper-V server. When the copy is complete, the new virtual machine is modified to ensure that the correct hardware abstraction layer (HAL) and drivers load and that Integration Services are installed. During this process, the source physical server experiences only a slight performance impact caused by the snapshot creation and the network copy.

The P2V migration process uses a wizard to gather the required information, make decisions based on that information, and create the job that will be executed to perform the migration. The migration wizard for an online P2V migration involves the following steps: