Mastering Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2

7.3. Converting to a Virtual Machine

Based on the information covered so far, you can create a virtual machine from a blank virtual disk, a virtual disk, or a template. An alternate way of creating a virtual machine is to convert an existing physical machine to a virtual machine and an existing virtual machine from a different hypervisor to Hyper-V or Virtual Server virtual machine. Creating a new virtual machine by converting a physical machine is known as Physical to Virtual (P2V) conversion. Creating a new virtual on Hyper-V or Virtual Server from a virtual machine on ESX is known as Virtual to Virtual (V2V) conversion.

P2V first deploys and installs an agent on a machine running Windows. The agent inspects the Windows instance and returns ...