In an earlier post, I blogged about P2V with VMware's P2V Assistant. Although the P2V Assistant works well, there are some drawbacks. The Knoppix boot cd, for example, needs to recognize your hardware for a successful P2V conversion. If the boot cd does not recognize your network card or disks, you are in trouble. The virtual machine creation process is also manual. This means you have to create the virtual machine yourself and attached the cloned disks manually.

There are several solutions on the market that make the P2V process much simpler. One of those solutions is the one from Leostream. Their solution for P2V is called P > V Direct.  At the time of this writing, the product version is 2.0.

A full description of the features of P > V Direct can be found at their website, but I would like to focus on a couple of advantages this product has over VMware's P2V Assistant.

First of all, the P2V solution consists of two components: P > V Direct and the Host Agent. P > V Direct is run on the (running) source system that needs to be converted. The host agent is installed on the virtualization server. VMware ESX server is supported with a Linux host agent.

Because P > V Direct runs directly on the running source system, there are no issues with unsupported hardware. There is no dependency on a boot cd that requires drivers for your hardware. Because the P > V Direct software clones the disks of a running system, you should turn off database applications. The copy is sector-based, so faster.

P > V Direct works together with the Host Agent. For example, it tells the host agent to automatically create a virtual machine with parameters you specify in P > V Direct (memory, disks). The disks are cloned by P > V Direct directly to the target virtual machine. Everything is fully automated.

The whole P2V process is so simple that anyone can do it without any specific training required. Because their pricing model is also simple and affordable, it is in reach for most of our customers, even small to medium companies.

Take a look in the tutorials section for a simple, step-by-step tutorial about how to use Leostream P > V Direct in a simple scenario.