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What is the easiest way to convert a Win2003 server to a Hyper-V Virtual machine?

Ideally, I'd like to use a backup tool to create an image across the network.

What is the best way to do this?

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up vote 6 down vote accepted

Microsoft SysInternals has a utility, Disk2Vhd, which will do this for you. You can run this on a live machine, and it can create a VHD file to an external location, such as a network drive. You can then copy this VHD to where it needs to live on the Hyper-V host, and create a new VM guest using that file.


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Disk2Vhd works great as a one-off tool (you may have to do some manual fixup to the HAL to get it to boot after converting the physical server to a VHD). If you are looking to do this in an enterprise environment (perhaps P2V-ing and managing multiple virtual servers) you would want to take a look at System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 (that's a mouthful!)

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