Quoting from InfoWorld

When planning a datacenter migration from P2V (physical to virtual), rebuilding servers in the virtual realm to take over for their physical counterparts is a task that must be accomplished manually — a complex, arduous, and money-burning effort. So what could be simpler than running a few apps on the target physical servers and magically watching them boot in the virtual realm?

Arguably, P2V migration is significantly easier on Linux than on Windows. Most enterprise-level Linux servers run with kernels that can handle abrupt hardware changes with aplomb. Windows Server 2003 is much better at handling hardware changes than previous iterations, but substantial hardware layout changes are still likely to result in an unbootable system or to cause odd, unexplainable problems with normal server function.

PlateSpin and Leostream’s P2V tools address these core difficulties. Leostream P>V supports Windows NT and Windows Server 2000 and 2003; whereas PlateSpin’s PowerConvert tool can handle several Linux distributions as well as the major Windows server platforms on the source side. Both can migrate to virtual servers hosted by VMware GSX and ESX Server, and Microsoft’s VirtualServer virtualization platforms.

To test these two P2V solutions, I built a few physical servers to be used as migration guinea pigs and deployed a fresh installation of VMware ESX Server 2.5.3 on a target VM host system. As with any virtualization platform, they needed plenty of memory, and Corsair came through with 8GB of DDR400 RAM.

I tasked both tools with one of the more worrisome Windows server migrations — migrating an active Windows 2003 SP1 Active Directory DC (domain controller). In the lab, I built a fresh DC on a Dell PowerEdge 2600 server with two NICs, a 50GB RAID5 volume running on the Dell PowerEdge Expandable RAID Controller, and 4GB of RAM. I then ran each conversion utility on the server to migrate it into a new virtual server running on an IBM Server x3550 running VMware ESX Server 2.5.3.

His bottom line:

Bottom Line:
Leostream’s P>V application provides a quick and easy migration path with a tiny footprint and requires no reboot of the source server. It’s best suited for development and testing environments and in some cases requires a bit of elbow grease to truly complete the migration.

Bottom Line:
PowerConvert is a thorough and detailed virtualization migration tool, although the process is relatively time-consuming and requires downtime for the source server. Overall, it’s a solid method of converting Windows servers from the physical to the virtual realm, and it offers plenty of DR and imaging features.

Bottom Line:
A good tool to use when profiling a physical network for a virtual infrastructure migration, PowerRecon provides valuable performance information and constructs a virtual server infrastructure based on that data. It is sometimes unnecessarily complex, and it lacks support for recent Linux enterprise releases.

Read the entire 3 page article, here.

Thanks to Richard Cardona for the news!