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Hi Experts,

I’m planing to create a virtual server and transfer all the records from the physical server to the virtual server.

The problem is that I don’t know how to do it kindly give me a guide.

7 Spice ups
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TechNet has a wealth of information on this, you may also try searching Spiceworks for a guide.#

This should be a good starting point.

3 Spice ups
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One word of advice if you have any type of licensing services or such, double check your licensing agreements. Some apps still have archaic licenses that don’t allow them to be virtualized.

3 Spice ups
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When you say records, do you mean server roles, files, or the whole system?

If everything, you need to look at P2V

2 Spice ups
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You can also use the free tool Disk2VHD - Disk2vhd - Sysinternals | Microsoft Learn

creates both VHD and VHDX format virtual disks suitable for Microsoft Hyper-V environments.

This what I’ve used and never had a problem with it. You can convert a full physical server to a virtual one (well the disk(s) anyway), either to local attached storage (USB Disk, spare disk on SATA controller etc) as well as to a UNC path or mapped drive.

Basic steps are:

  1. Isolate Server from the LAN if needed

  2. Run Disk-2-VHD

  3. Select the target Disks to convert to Virtual Disks

  4. Select the destination device to save to

  5. click run…

  6. add the created VHD to a Virtual machine

  7. shutdown physical server

  8. Spin-up Virtual machine

  9. job done

2 Spice ups
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The problem is that you don’t even know enough to search the internet for a guide, so I suspect you’re going to come unstuck.

What, exactly, do you want to achieve? By that, I don’t mean “I want to create a virtual server and transfer all the records, whatever they are.”, but what is the goal of doing this?

3 Spice ups
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The goal is to access the servers easily and turn off the physical server to conserve energy because we have lots of server running at the same time for example we have server for instant messaging, we have server for accounting software, we have server for spice works and I noticed that they do not need to be running in separate servers.

That’s why i decided to try virtual server.

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I will try it tomorrow seems promising.

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Hi ernest,

You can use the VMware Converter Standalone to convert the physical to virtual servers.Otherwise use the Disk2VHD tool.It is used to convert a physical machine to a virtual machine. Basically, as the name suggests, Disk2VHD converts logical volumes to VHD files. These VHD files can then be used either to create a virtual machine on Hyper-V or attach VHD file as a second drive to the existing virtual machines.

1 Spice up
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just to make the new Virtual Machine run better i’d like to add;

  1. remove/uninstall any drivers or software for physical hardware. (good time to remove old software too)

  2. install Hyper-V Integration Tools.

2 Spice ups
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Good addition!

Yes, definitely removing any unnecessary drivers and software is a good idea, especially all the system management stuff you may have like HP System Management etc!

I also recommend cleaning out any old log files from the Windows\System32\LogFiles folder as well as deleting any cached downloads and tempoary internet files etc.

Also don;t forget that after virtualisation, the Network card will be a different ‘model’ and if you assign it the same IP Addressing information, Windows will warn you that another previous Network Interface had these details.