I’ve been looking for an easy way to perform HyperV P2V (Physical to Virtual) conversions for a while. Previously the only way I’d found was either to use System Center Virtual Machine Manager or to convert to VMWare and then convert the VMware image to a VHD.
Well today I found Disk2VHD – an excellent free tool from sysinternals (Microsoft).
Unlike other tools – Disk2VHD runs locally on the physical machine you want to convert. The disadvantage here is that you can’t convert a remote machine. The advantage is that it’s generally easier than pushing a remote agent and potentially rebooting the client.
It really is easy to use! You just run it up on the machine which you want to convert, then tell it where to place the VHD (a network path is fine – and recommended).
That’s it – leave it to run and you end up with a nicely packaged VHD image.
Here’s some further resources/reading to help you with the conversion:
Download Disk2VHD From Microsoft
How To Turn a Physical Computer into A Virtual Machine with Disk2vhd