Schedule p2v vmware converter

To use VMware Converter Enterprise, you first need to obtain a copy. There are really two ways to do this. While either of these will perform your P2V conversions for you, I preferred the edition of VMware Converter that was already built in to my VI client and installable directly from there. Downloading and installing the VMware Converter Enterprise plugin is much easier than downloading an installable application.

From there, the window shown in Figure 1 will appear. In a few seconds, you will be asked for your setup language and, what appears to be a regular application installation commences. Here are screenshots from that installation:.

Figure 2: Converter Installation. Figure 3: Converter Installation Progress. The installation only takes a few seconds. When done, you will be back at the plugin manager and you will see that the VMware Converter is installed. Figure 4: Converter Plugin is installed. At this point, we are directed to the installed tab to enable the new plugin. I clicked on the installed tab, and found the Converter Enterprise client and clicked Enabled.

Once enabled, you will find that if you right-click on an ESX host system in the VI client, there will be a new option — Import Machine. This option is the result of the newly installed and enabled VMware Converter Enterprise. To do this, we would select the ESX Server that we want to import this new virtual machine to, right-click on the ESX host , and click import machine.

You will be asked what the source of your import is. In our case we will import from a physical computer. Figure 8: Source of system being converted. Figure 9: Physical computer hostname and administrative credentials. BackupChain can take a simultaneous snapshot of all disks on the server and convert them simultaneously so you have a completely consistent P2V migration of your server.

The VMDK files can be placed on a network share or external drive from where you can mount or boot them at any time immediately without the need of copying. As a free virtualization platform, VirtualBox has gained momentum, especially for the purpose of backup servers. Similar to VMware, VirtualBox is great for a variety of operating systems and also runs on many different host operating systems free of charge.

BackupChain offers scheduled physical to virtual conversion and uses version backup to automatically clean older copies. Alternatively you can mount disk images at any time and extract files from them.

Once the agent is installed, you can view source details. Notice that VMware Converter 6. Hit Close , then hit Next in the Source System window. Step 2: Destination System. As a physical machine running Windows Server used in this example must be converted to a VM running on an ESXi host, VMware Infrastructure virtual machine must be selected in VMware Converter for this step; select the destination server.

Step 3: Destination Virtual Machine. Step 4: Destination Location. Select the ESXi host, cluster or resource pool that is connected to the selected Datacenter and select the datastore available on that ESXi host. There must be enough free space on the selected datastore. If the modern operating system is installed on a source machine, you can select the latest available virtual machine version hardware version for the destination VM. The virtual machine version that can be selected also depends on a version of the destination ESXi host.

Step 5: Options. This step allows you to select the following options for the destination VM:. Data to copy. Select which disks and volumes you want to copy. You can select thick or thin provisioning type for destination virtual disks you should select advanced view and resize volumes if needed.

In this example, a physical disk that contains two volumes is converted to a thin provisioned virtual disk. It is recommended that you tick the checkboxes:. You can select the number of virtual processors, processor cores, virtual disk controllers, and memory size. Select networks to which virtual network adapters of the VM must be connected. On the Source Services tab, you can select which running services on the source Windows machine to stop before starting P2V conversion with VMware Converter.

On the Destination Services tab, you can select the startup mode for services on the destination VM. Advanced options. There are two tabs — Synchronize and Post-conversion. In the Post-conversion tab, you can set the power state for a source machine and destination machine after P2V conversion is finished.

The Post-conversion processing options are:. Throttling allows you to perform your usual tasks during the conversion process. Step 6: Summary. Check your settings for the new machine conversion job you created and if everything is correct, click Finish to start conversion in VMware Converter. After machine conversion is started, wait until the conversion process is fully completed.

The time needed for conversion depends on the amount of data stored on the source machine disks and network speed. Now that a Windows machine is converted, power on the destination VM if you have not selected to power on the VM automatically during conversion job creation. As you recall, in our example we have selected to install VMware Tools on the destination virtual machine automatically.