Also known as "P2V" Physical-to-Virtual describes the process of decoupling and migrating a physical server's OS, applications, and data from a physical server to a virtual machine guest hosted on a virtualization platform.

Methods of P2V

Manual P2V

• User manually creates a virtual machine in a virtual host environment and reinstalls OS, applications and data to match those of the source machine

Semi-automated P2V

• Performing a P2V migration using a tool that assists the user in moving the servers from physical state to virtual machine
• VMware provides semi-automated tools for moving physical servers into virtual environments

Fully automated P2V

• Performing a P2V migration using a tool that migrates the server over the network without any assistance from the user.
• PlateSpin is an example of a fully automated migration tool for P2V.