Physical Machine to Virtual Machine (P2V) Conversion

Convert Physical Machine to Virtual Machine:

It is essential to understand the resemblance of virtual machines, particularly when it is regarding VM migrations in a virtualized cloud or to the data center. A VM maintains a relationship between various virtual machines and between a hypervisor and a VM in a grouped server environment.

Physical to-VM exchange is a procedure via which a physical machine is transformed into a virtual machine. When transforming a physical machine, the converted application copies data on the hard disk of the source machine and shifts that data to the target virtual disk.

Copying is the procedure of generating a copied disk, where the copied disk is a virtual disk which is an exact clone of the source physical disk. After the completion of copying, the steps of system configuration are executed to configure the target virtual machine. System configuration is the procedure of configuring the migrating operating systems to facilitate their work on virtual hardware. This configuration is executed on the destination virtual disk after copying and facilitates the destination virtual disk to work as a bootable disk in a virtual machine. After the completion of the conversion, migration of data can be done.

Converter Components:

The P2V ‘converter application‘ comprises three constituents –

i. Converter Server: A converter server is an application which is loaded on a discrete physical machine. It manages the conversion procedure in hot mode. While running the conversion, the converter server propels and launches a converter agent on the source physical machine which requires conversion.

ii. Converter Agent: A converter agent is liable for running the physical to virtual machine conversion. This agent is deployed on the physical machine merely for hot conversion.

iii. Converter Boot: A converter boot CD is a bootable CD through which the operating system and converter application run and are used for cold conversion when it is needed.

Conversion Process:

Hot converting of physical machine to virtual machine:

Hot conversion of a physical machine to a virtual machine comprises steps which are as follows:

1. The source machine is prepared by the converter for the conversion by installing the agent on the source physical machine.

2. A snapshot of the source has been taken by the agent.

3. The converter server constructs a virtual machine on the target machine.

4. The agent copies the physical disk of the source machine to the virtual disk of the target virtual machine.

5. The agent synchronizes the data and installs the vital drivers to permit the OS to boot from a VM and personalize the virtual machine.

6. The virtual machine is prepared to work on the target server.

Cold converting of a physical machine to the virtual machine:

In cold conversation of a machine, the source physical machine is rebooted, having its operating system. The conversion of the physical machine to a virtual machine is shown below figure. Cold conversion of a physical machine to a virtual machine includes the following steps:

1. Converter software is running on the server.

2. Agent is installed on the physical machine by the server.

3. Agent takes a snapshot of the data.

4. Virtual machine is created by the server on the physical machine.

5. Copy the source disk to the virtual machine.

6. Hypervisor is running on a physical machine.

While performing the conversion of physical to a virtual machine, you should consider the following points:

1. A virtual machine developed by the converter application encloses a duplicate of the disk state of the source physical machine.

2. Throughout this conversion, several hardware-dependent drivers and sometimes the mapped drive can’t be preserved.