I posted a while back about how to P2V convert a physical Linux machine to a Hyper-V virtual machine. I really only looked at nasty complicated solutions that required knowing Linux. You can P2V Windows machines using Virtual Machine Manager but not Linux machines.
Some conversations last week at the summit revealed an alternative that I really should have thought of. It’s not NDA stuff.
You can use the free VMware vCenter Converter to P2V a Linux VM. That creates a VMware VM with a VMDK disk file. The downside is that it appears that the target must be VMware ESX, ESXi, Workstation or Player (See below comment).
Now, you can use a tool to convert the VMDK to a Microsoft VHD disk file, e.g. VMDK2VHD. Now you have a disk you can attach to a Hyper-V VM and boot from. You can then install your integration components which are supported on RHEL and SLES. They’ll install on other distros but are not MS supported.
At least, that’s the theory. I’ve not tried this. It feels like it’ll work.
It’s a shame that a Linux tool has to be used for this. It’ll look bad for a MS partner consultant who has sold a client on the idea of Microsoft virtualisation to break out a VMware tool for a P2V of Linux VM’s. Sure, they’ll be the majority of VM’s but there’s still a good number of them out there.
To P2V a linux machine with Vmware Converter, you must have an ESX server. Workstation destination is only available for windows machines
A quick note: Conversion from a physical Linux server to Hyper-V via VMWave converter/ ESXI host definately works. I have used the above method to migrate 2 OpenSUSE servers successfully when other options failed.