Virtual Server 2005 Migration Kit (VSMT)
I've been using VPC 2004 for over a year now and feel that it is a great product from MS that allows you to “virtualize” machines so that you can install various types of applications without affecting your underlying (also called “host”) operating system. Recently, I was involved in majorly marketing VS 2005 to be used in our organization for all our release management servers so that testing can be easily done on various versions without having to spend days bringing up earlier versions to replicate a client issue.
In this regard, I remembered some of my collegues mentioning that other virtual machine applications allowed you to “factor” an existing physical machine into a virtual machine so that you can quickly do the convertion of an existing machine. While I was pondering about how useful this might be, I ran across the Virtual Server 2005 Migration Toolkit (VSMT) from Microsoft that does exactly that!! This was a feature that was missing in the earlier releases of Virtual PC and it is a great boon now.
VSMT is a free downloadable tool that simplies the migration of an existing operating system along with a set of applications from a physical server to a server running under a virtual machine managed by Virtual Server 2005. Suffice to say that the migration process requires quite a lot of networking basics and it is better to have your system administrator around when you experiment with this feature :-)
You can learn more about VSMT here: Virtual Server 2005 Migration Kit.