Recently, I downloaded and tried VMware Converter Beta. It is VMware's new P2V (and V2V) product. This publicly available download is the Starter Edition and is free to use. There is also an Enterprise edition with additional features. When compared to their previous P2V product, P2V Assistant, VMware Converter has the following extra features that jump out:

Online P2V
The source machine (physical or virtual) keeps running during the P2V process. This is similar to what vendors like Leostream and PlateSpin offer. Obviously, this is not a good method for all your servers but might be for some. Note that the Starter Edition only supports this method. Another limitation of the Starter Edition is the fact that you cannot initiate P2V conversions of remote servers. In other words, you have to install the full package (agent and management tool) on the source machine to convert it. The Enterprise edition supports installing the management tool on a separate machine to push agents to remote machines to convert them. In that case, multiple P2V conversions can be initiated at the same time and followed from the management tool.

Offline P2V with a WinPE boot cd
The source machine is turned off and booted with a WinPE boot cd. A tool is provided to inject new Windows drivers into the cd image. The P2V Assistant boot cd was based on Knoppix and thus required Linux drivers. The boot cd is only for the Enterprise Edition and is the method of choice to create a consistent image of the source server.

No need for a helper virtual machine
With ESX as the destination, the P2V Assistant required a helper virtual machine. This is not the case for VMware Converter. When you configure a conversion, you just specify the target ESX server or VirtualCenter and VMware Converter takes care of creating the destination virtual machine, the disks, etc… This makes it much simpler and easier to use.

VMware Tools and reconfiguration
When you configure a conversion, you can specify that the VMware Tools have to be installed automatically. You can also reconfigure the virtual machine and give it a new name, new IP, etc… The reconfiguring is done with sysprep.

I tried a few conversions and had a couple of issues. First of all, make sure you have name resolution correctly configured so that the name of your target ESX server can be resolved to an IP address. That should not be an issue in a production environment but in a test environment, that is easily overlooked (as I did). I also had an issue with the imaging process itself. Apparently, VMware Converter uses Volume Shadow Copy services on operating systems that support it. On my test source machine, these services were disabled and naturally, the imaging process failed. After starting the Volume Shadow Copy service and the MS Software Shadow Copy Provider services everything worked like a charm.

VMware Converter looks promising but VMware should make the enterprise flavour free as well and this for several reasons. The first reason is that P2V in itself is not what matters most. Granted, it is an important process in a virtualization project but in the end, it is the virtualization itself and the management of the virtualized environment that counts. Secondly, the product only makes P2V just a bit easier. With some 3^rd party imaging tools and VMware's Virtual Machine Importer 2.0, you can also achieve the same end result.