The hot clone process may work fine if the source does not have dynamically changing data and is relatively static. Many server or workstation types may do well with a hot clone process while the machine is in a powered-on state. So when would you want to perform a cold clone vs. Hot denotes the source machine for the VMware Converter for P2V or V2V is powered on, whereas cold refers to a powered-off machine. The above options illustrate the difference between what is known as a hot clone vs. Using VMware Converter to Converted powered-off virtual machines Hot vs.
VMware Converter (VMware standalone converter), now known as VMware vCenter converter Standalone, is a tool used in VMware vSphere environments to convert physical and virtual machines to VMware virtual machines, using the VMware Converter for P2V process. In addition, as physical server hardware ages and nears the end of its lifecycle, organizations can use the VMware Converter for P2V process to move workloads off servers that are no longer supported to virtual machines running in supported hypervisor environments, such as VMware vSphere. It helps organizations realize the objective of their server consolidation projects. Instead of having to “lift and shift” physical servers to virtual machines using challenging migration processes, organizations can use the VMware Converter for P2V process to simply take the Server as-is and seamlessly convert it to a virtual machine. Instead, organizations can utilize the underlying resources much more by running a hypervisor on top of the bare metal server. Modern CPU, memory, and storage resources are generally not used to their fullest potential by a single workload loaded on the bare metal server itself and running multiple workloads on the same hardware instead of just one. Since the onset of the server virtualization movement with modern hypervisors, it provides much more efficient use of server hardware resources with the powerful technology and hardware in current enterprise servers. The VMware Converter for P2V operation allows organizations to achieve the objective of server consolidation.
However, after a P2V operation, the assigned resources, such as CPU and memory, can easily be adjusted or changed. The virtual machine then retains the same state as the physical computer, including the operating system, applications, configuration, data, and even assigned resources. Unlike a migration where you take the applications and data from one computer and copy them to an entirely new platform, with VMware Converter for P2V, you take an exact image-level copy of the physical computer and transform it into a virtual machine. Intuitively, P2V stands for “physical to virtual” and represents the process of converting and migrating a physical computer image into a virtual machine (VM).
So let’s see how to perform the all-important VMware Converter for P2V conversion. VMware Converter has long been a solution to allow easily virtualizing physical workloads and transitioning these to virtual machines. However, many businesses may still have physical workloads running in their data center due to various reasons.Īs the hardware lifecycle reaches its end for physical workloads, most businesses will look to virtualize physical server workloads and run them inside a virtual machine. Virtual workloads account for the majority of servers running in most environments today. Most organizations are well on their virtual journey in the enterprise data center and we will discover here how VMware Converter for P2V will help complete it.