P2V Migration Toolkit components - what’s going on behind the scenes?

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I’m excited about the RC2 release of the System Center Configuration Manager P2V migration Toolkit, and in this post I wanted to share the components of the task sequence and what they do.

This is going to be a two part post…

In this initial post, I’ll define each of the programs that are called during the task sequence. In part two, I’ll list the steps of task sequence.  

 

The bitmap above is a pretty good summary of each component, but I wanted to provide a little more detail in this post.

  • VHDCapture.exe: This executable is leveraged by the task sequence to create an exact replica of any of the selected MBR-based physical disks and convert them into Virtual Hard Drives (VHDs). The parameters that are passed to it, in form of tasks sequence variables specify the VHD file save location as well as the disk and partition selected.
  • VHDPrep.exe: Once the VHD(s) are created, this executable is called by the task sequence. Its job is to perform ‘fix-up’ and compact the disk. ‘Fix-up’ is a term we’ve used to denote the following:
    • Injects critical boot drivers to allow the VHD to properly boot
    • Correct NT Boot Sector issues for Windows Server 2003
    • Align the physical disk layout to virtual disk layout
    • Modifies boot entries to leverage virtual storage drivers

Finally, VHDPrep compacts the selected virtualized disks removing any unused space to reduce the overall file size the VHDs.   

  • VMCreator.exe: This executablesingular job is to configure Hyper-V specific settings and attach the VHD(s) as Hyper-V Virtual Machines. VMCreator consumes the defined task sequence variables to set the Virtual Machine name, configure the amount of memory to be utilized by the VM as well as creating a Hyper-V network bound to the specified NIC.

Hopefully this post was helpful in providing a deeper understanding of what is actually happening “behind the scenes” of the P2V Migration Toolkit task sequence. Stay tuned for part two!

Cheers,

            -Ben