VMM: Son of FAQ - including "what is offline P2V?"

More FAQs:

Q: Is there a way I can tell if a machine in  my inventory is virtual?

A: If the registry key --  HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Virtual Machine is present, the machine is a VM. 

Q: What are the best cost/performance hard drives for hosts? SATA, SAS, or SCISI? How to configure RAID for optimal performance?  Is it better to have many smaller HDs than fewer bigger ones etc…?

A:  The more spindles the better, the faster the drive IO the better, RAID 1 or 0+1 are good, 0 is neutral. 

Q: What is the list of MS applications that are supported to run virtually?

A: The much shorter list is those that are not supported, so we publish that at https://support.microsoft.com/kb/897614. 

Q: Can I use P2V on a source that is not domain joined?  I need this for DMZ machines and acquisitions.

A: No. In V1 all P2V sources must be machines that are either in the same domain as the VMM server, or members of another domain that has a full 2-way trust with the vmm server’s domain.

Q: What is "offline" P2V?

A: On-line P2V uses snapshots to capture the data on the drives to acheive an application-level consistent conversion.  However, this requires that the application is VSS framework-aware. Off-line P2V copies a customized image of WinPE 2.0 to the physical system and reboots to it, then the data from the disks are transferred to the target Virtual Server and put in .vhd format. The matrix of what OS’s support on-line and off-line p2v as at https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb740951.aspx . The way I think of the difference is that online P2V is a good choice for cloning a machine, and may require you to monitor and fix up any issues if you have applications running that might modify data during the conversion. Offline P2V is a good choice for migrating a machine, and usually won't have any issues for you to fix up, since there are no apps running during the conversion.

Q: Where is the MP?

A: The Management Pack for SCVMM is now available in the donwload center: https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=fd03b1e6-d7a8-44b4-bc2f-676565d042c2&DisplayLang=en