I have read the Wiki about P2V and have also done a test conversion of a Windows Server 2012R2 with VMWare Converter that worked fine. Is there any reason that using a boot disc/USB and running qemu-img with the source raw disk(s) output to qcow2 files on the storage area for the VM wouldn't work just as well? From what I could tell VMWare Converter didn't do anything to the guest when converting the disk to VMDK. I still had to manually remove all of the old devices from the converted system and manually created the VM config with the GUI.
P2V Windows Server with qemu-img?
- Thread starter bsnipes
- Start date
My thought was that if the server could be taken offline, wouldn't qemu-img be a good alternative to duplicate the original physical server disks over to the Proxmox storage area as opposed to the VMWare Converter running on the original physical host. From testing, it looks like VMWare Converter would be faster if most of the drive wasn't full of data. But then you still have to convert the VMDK to RAW or qcow2.
I am not having any issues but needed to P2V a physical Exchange server and was looking at the different ways of doing it. Since it is Exchange, the services have to be fully stopped for VMWare Converter to work properly on it. In my case, the server might as well be offline. If not much data was in use on the server, I could see Clonezilla being just as good of an option. For simplicity it just seems like qemu-img would be a good alternative.
You can directly use VMDK in Proxmox and than convert them with 'move disk' to raw or qcow2.
VMDK images run on QEMU but they are slow.