Easily Convert A Physical Box To A Virtual Machine

If you do any kind of development or tech support work, it is important to have multiple environments to perform your testing. Traditionally the only way this was possible was either by multi-booting or having dedicated machines for these environments, however this is now easily accomplished through the magic of virtual machines.

If you have some old boxes which are still running test environments, you can easily convert them to virtual machines using the free Sysinternals’ Disk2vhd tool.

Disk2vhd is a utility that creates VHD (Virtual Hard Disk – Microsoft’s Virtual Machine disk format) versions of physical disks for use in Microsoft Virtual PC or Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs). The difference between Disk2vhd and other physical-to-virtual tools is that you can run Disk2vhd on a system that’s online.

The ability to perform a live snapshot is incredibly useful for testing. For example, if you are wondering how a service pack will affect your current setup, just create a VM from the installation and then install the service pack in the VM. If anything breaks, you will know about it.

This is definitely a great tool for system administrators and IT professionals to know about.

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Jase
is there a tool that works in reverse, ie something that reads vhd files and lets you put them back on physical drives?.
I’ve got all my common system configurations currently saved in virtual machines, it’d save me a hell of a lot of time messing around with actual physical disks if I could do that.
Jason Faulkner
There isn’t one that I know of.
You could try imaging the VM using any imaging software and then restoring it the physical machine.
lespaul20
You can do this as well with VMware’s Converter, http://www.vmware.com/products/converter/
It will give you the option to convert directly into an esx environment or into a .vmdk format for VMware workstation/player or Virtualbox as well(which I prefer). Virtualbox also supports VHDs.
David Kennedy
Big feature win for VMs. I remember when VMs first came out, and sys admins insisted we convert everything over to them. Except of course we had to spend more time than it was work setting stuff up on new “machines”.