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We have a remote location that is connected to our central infrastructure via a 2.4 Mbps TLS connection. There is a Windows Server 2003 SP1 domain controller at that location that we would like to virtualize on a Hyper-V virtual host running on Server 2008 R2 Core (also at the same remote location) Both the source computer (the domain controller) and the virtual host are located on the same LAN which is capable of 1Gbit speeds. SCVMM lives on a virtual machine back at main office (at the other end of the TLS link).

I would like to do an online P2V of the domain controller to the virtual host using the SCVMM installation we already have. This technet article seems to indicate that only the "meta-data" (such as machine.xml) required for the VMM host (the Hyper-V virtual host) is sent back and forth between the SCVMM machine (the VMM server). Our remote connection can obviously not sustain the traffic required for imaging the physical machine during the P2V process - I want all of the imaging traffic to stay on the remote location's LAN.

scvmm online p2v

Can anyone confirm that when doing an online P2V using SCVMM located on another network segment than the source computer and the virtual host that no imaging traffic (or any bandwidth intensive) traffic is sent between the SCVMM server and either the source computer or the virtual host?

What happens to the physical host if I cancel the P2V process? Will it fail safe (i.e., will the source machine be effected)?

  • you can start and stop at will, this way you can tell what the traffic will be. since I have not used scvmm in a long time I can't quite remember the entire network impact, I do know that it uses BITS and will throttle itself appropriately. – tony roth Oct 05 '11 at 22:08
  • also disk2vhd will do the online p2v and you can control the network situation a little easier. either way you'll experience downtime when you do the cutover. – tony roth Oct 06 '11 at 00:25

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I finally had the opportunity to do a P2V in an environment that supported SFlow and I can confirm that there is not any significant amount of traffic sent between the VMM host or the source computer and the remote SCVMM machine. It appears that it is just the SCVMM install agent and source computer meta data.

The largest spike of traffic (650Kbit/s) is when I added the vMM host to SCVMM. There was another spike of traffic during the P2V phase where the SCVMM prepped the source computer during the "Gathering System Information" section of the P2V process. If your network links are slower than 1Mbps (or are very busy) I could see this being temporarily problematic, but it seems my biggest fear of constant stream of back-and-forth meta data between the VMM host and the remote SCVMM machine is unfounded.

And as Tony mentioned, BITS should throttle any traffic appropriately.

SFlow Data