Experience using Disk2Vhd to P2V migrate Exchange Server

exchange-2007hyper-vvirtualization

I'm interested to know your thoughts and/or experience with using Disk2vhd to migrate a physical Exchange 2007 server to a virtual machine. I assume (from reading articles on P2V exchange) that using System Center's P2V tools is the preferred method, but I'm on a tight budget. I read about Disk2vhd, a free sysinternals tool, while doing bing/google searches and while I did find some articles on P2V Exchange using Disk2vhd the articles were older and were based in lab environments. I want to know has anyone used Disk2vhd in a production environment, after successful testing of course, for a P2V migration of Exchange using Hyper-V. What did you experience? Any advice on such a migration?

Best Answer

You will need to schedule at least several hours of downtime and shut down all of the Exchange services before beginning the P2V process. My suggestion for how to proceed "on the cheap" would vary depending on your operating system:

  1. If you are running Server 2008 or newer, Disk2VHD will work as long as your drive is a simple volume.
  2. If your OS is Windows Server 2003, I'd recommend using XenConvert and selecting VHD as the target file type.

Once you have your VHD file on your Hyper-V server, shut the old Exchange server down, unplug the old server's power and LAN conections (seriously, unplug it) and fire up the VM.

If it works, your old server sits in a closet for a week and then gets wiped. If it doesn't work correctly, your back-out plan is to shut down the VM and plug the old server back in.

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