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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?

Art.Vandelay05
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  • Last time I checked `Disk2vhd` doesn't support Dynamic disks. If you are using this on your system, then you may be out of luck. We tried doing a disk2vhd n our Exchange server, and we could never disk2vhd to give us a bootable image. So we gave up and just started building a second Exchange server running 2013 since we were planning on upgrading anyway. My opinion is just try it in a test environment. If it works for you then go ahead. – Zoredache Dec 14 '13 at 01:06
  • There is nothing particularly special about Exchange in this context; if you shut Exchange down completely before you start the P2V process, it's going to work fine on the virtual side as long as you've been successful in migrating the underlying drives and operating system and you have restored network connectivity to the VM. What is the underlying operating system? – Skyhawk Dec 14 '13 at 03:16

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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.

Skyhawk
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  • Thank you for the thorough response. I appreciate it. I will go this route. Thanks again! I'll post back here after the migration. :) – Art.Vandelay05 Dec 16 '13 at 14:22
  • Don't forget that your VM may initially need a "legacy network adapter" if you're P2Ving an older version of Windows. – Skyhawk Dec 16 '13 at 19:26
  • Hi Skyhawk. We haven't done the conversion on our Exchange server yet. We are consolidating the "easier" servers first. Our exchange server runs on Windows Server 2008 R2. Will the partitions carry over into the converted server? The C: drive on our exchange server is running low, so will the virtual instance of our Exchange server have the same drive problems? I assume not, but you know what happens when you assume things! :) – Art.Vandelay05 Feb 20 '14 at 17:14
  • Initially, each volume will have the same capacity as on the original system. However, a variety of third-party tools will allow you to resize the VHD files, after which you can resize the partitions within them. You may want to run Disk2VHD on your Exchange server and play with the VHD files in an *offline test environment* to discover exactly what you will need to do. – Skyhawk Feb 20 '14 at 18:22