Once embracing Virtuozzo for server consolidation a basic need is to port existing physical server inside the virtual infrastructure.
Doing this operation manually can be really time-consuming and painful, since you’re not just cloning your existing operating system and restoring it on an identical machine, but you’re changing the whole underlying hardware, which can lead to drivers reinstallation or possibly the dreadful blue screen of death. In any case you’re to front a long down-time.
To avoid this many virtualization vendors started to offer so called physical to virtual (P2V) migration utilities, which speeds up movement operation and solves on the fly drivers incompatibilities.
Since Virtuozzo for Windows 3.5.1 SWsoft itself introduced a physical to virtual (P2V) migration tool called VZP2V.
Most P2V solutions need to deploy a migration assistant agent on the physical server before starting to port it inside virtual infrastructure. Some of them, like Virtuozzo VZP2V, can remotely install it knowing machine administrative username and password (this procedure will be painful if you hardened your server stopping NetBIOS services).
The P2V wizard will show physical server details before proceeding and will ask you what drive (if more than one is present) to migrate into VPS and what to do with the physical server:
The whole operation takes place in a SSH tunnel for maximum security.
Migrating a Windows Server 2003 with 4 GB hard disk (no RAID configuration) took 50 minutes on a standard 10/100 Ethernet segment. And the resulting VPS worked flawless.
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