Do you wish there was a hassle free way to migrate physical machines to VMs for testing and consolidation? Today we take a look at Disk2VHD from Sysinternals which is a simple solution for turning physical Windows machines into VM’s–even while they’re up and running.

Running Disk2VHD

Disk2vhd allows you to create a Virtual Hard Drive (VHD) of a physical machine even while the machine is up and running using volume snapshot technology. This small utility doesn’t require installation and you can run it from a flash drive if you want. Just open up the Disk2vhd folder and run the executable.

Agree to the EULA…

Now select the physical drive you want to turn into a VHD, give it a name and location to create and store it. You’ll need to select a location that is large enough to store the VHD you’re creating. In this example we’re creating a VHD from an IBM ThinkPad running XP. Notice the space required under the Volumes to include section shows 6.48GB and the E: drive is actually an 8GB travel drive. Also, If you’re creating a VHD from XP or Server 2003 and will be running it on Microsoft Virtual PC, check the box Fix up HAL for Virtual PC. After everything looks correct, click on the Create button.

You’re shown the progress bar while the VHD is created. The XP VHD from an older IBM ThinkPad G40 used for this test took about an hour to complete. The amount of time it takes to create the VHD will vary from system to system.

Setup on Windows Virtual PC

Here we’ll take a look at running the newly created VHD on Virtual PC in Windows 7.