Moving Physical Machines to Virtual Machines

We have an old server that served us well for the past 5 years. It has a 500 MHZ Xeon and makes a lot of noise. Definitely needed an upgrade. Since we already have dedicated linux servers at our hosting facility, this machine was just legacy Windows stuff that i wanted to preserve. I have been using VmWare workstation for a long time and really a big supporter of Virtualization. So we decided to go the virtual server route

I had two options

• 1. Create a new virtual machine from scratch, Install OS, and move the necessary files
• 2. Try to create the exact replica of the machine if possible

I started option 1 and then realized its too much work and you always are not sure if you moved everything. Then i found VMWare converter, that just needs the address of the physical machine and creates a virtual machine out of it.

It works by installing a client utility on the remote machine. After the installation is done it starts copying the hard drives to a network volume. This volume needs to be accessible to the source machine.