Move Physical Windows Server 2008 into a Hyper-V VM

Question

I'd like to import a real Windows Server 2008 server as a Hyper-V Virtual Server on another Windows Server 2008 instance.

Anyone have any idea how to do this?

I'm looking at the System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 but it doesn't seem to import Windows Server 2008 - nor is it free.

Is there some other workaround (i.e. import the image into VMWare first, then convert to Hyper-V)?

Please help.

Regards, Randall

Answer 1

while testing disaster recovery, iwas pleasantly surprised (and impressed) that the builtin windows server backup restored to hyper-v without a hitch. this was on production hardware, with hw raid 5 and such - so i expect it would work with slightly less exotic stuff as well.

Answer 2

I know from personal experience that using VMware's converter works to take an image of the system. You can then use Hyper V to import the VMware image you created.

When I was testing the the beta version of Hyper-V this was the only reliable method I found to import a physical system into a Hyper-V environment.

It's seems crazy to doubled convert something, but it worked!