Physical to virtual machine conversion

[RickMcKeon]

When converting a physical machine to a virtual machine (intended for use on an ESXi host) using VMware's vCenter converter, the only option for a destination target seems to be an ESXi host.

But let's say I just want to convert the physical machine to a VM or a collection of vmdks, but store it somewhere else say an external hard drive. I don't want to use it immediately, I just need to store it until I get an ESXi server and I can then import it into the datastore of the new host and deploy the VM. The physical machine will be gone by the time we have the ESXi host.

I can't seem to find an alternative for doing this...any ideas?

[a_p_]

Possible destinations depend on the operating system running on the hardware. For Linux you can only use ESXi as the target. For Windows you may use VMware Workstation as the target and - once the ESXi host is available - convert the Workstation VM to the ESXi host.

André

[RickMcKeon]

There is Windows 2012 R2 Standard running on the physical machine. It's production server, that's why I'm a bit worried about converting it to Workstation and then converting it AGAIN to ESXi.

[a_p_]

The second conversion (Workstation to ESXi) can be done offline and is more or less only a conversion of the virtual disk format.

What I don't understand yet, is how you are planning to synchronize the data, when you convert the server now but still let the physical server running!?

André

[RickMcKeon]

Synchronizing the data is a separate issue, which I have already sorted.

I'm thinking of taking the route of putting another ESXi server on the network temporarily, converting P2V from the physical server to the temporary ESXi, then using the same converter to convert/move V2V from the temp host to the new host once it's installed.