How to visualize a physical system for Hyper-V

Physical to Virtual (P2V)

There are many different ways to visualize systems.  I did a video on how to use Disk2VHD if you want to see it visit my youtube channel.  This post is going to cover how to use Sysinternals disk2vhd application.  Disk2vhd is a utility that creates a virtual hard disk (VHD/VHDX) for use in Microsoft Virtual PC or Microsoft Hyper-V. The difference between Disk2vhd and other physical-to-virtual tools is that you can run Disk2vhd on a system that’s online. Disk2vhd uses Windows' Volume Snapshot (VSS) capability to create consistent point-in-time snapshots of the volumes you want to include in a conversion.

Disk2VHD GUI

Disk2VHD is a very small application and can just be run from a directory it does not need to be installed.  You can see from the GUI above the options are very simple to select, and since Disk2 VHD uses windows VSS capabilities you can save the VHD/VHDX to the drive your cloning but it is not recommended.  I recommend you always save to a drive that you are not visualizing.

Disk2VHD Progress

You can continue to use the System as your visualizing it just keep in mind it may not catch all your changes as the VHD/VHDX is created.  Here is a great post about when to use VHD/VHDX https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/ausoemteam/2015/04/24/deciding-on-when-to-use-vhdx-or-vhd-files-with-hyper-v/ If your using server 2008R2 or older you will have to use vhd

When the process is complete you should see a .vhd/vhdx file in your file system that you can now use to attach to a Hyper-V virtual machine.

Finished Conversion