Xen doesn't officially offer a P2V solution for migrating existing physical Windows instances into XEN VMs. Their answer is a link to two vendors that offer XEN support for their P2V products. Both companies, however, charge a few hundred bucks per-migration, which makes it a bit expensive for the one-off migrations here and there (in both vendors' defense, the P2V functions aren't the main purpose of their products). I've used the following steps to perform migrations of Dell-based Windows 2003 Server instances into XEN virtual machines simply using NTBackup, without having to purchase any "P2V" tools/licenses.
These steps basically mimic how one can recover a Windows server onto new hardware after a failure, with some extra precautions taken to avoid interrupting the existing physical instance until it's ready to be replaced.
The steps:
To learn more and to read the entire article, please refer to the rest of the article at its source: geekpoet: Manual "P2V" migration of a Windows server into a XEN VM instance
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