Hi Mate, sorry we do have few other, like puremessge and all.
I don't agree with hughborg. I take the opposite approach, and we just had this happen where I work.
we had a few AD / Exchange machines that needed to be migrated. Rather than migrate the machines, they chose to rebuild as NEW. Bad move. For one the settings that were already in place were not transferred. So YEARS of tweaking, getting things right and registry updates and settings had to be recreated.
Had these machines simply been p2v we wouldn't have had to spent the last month (and we STILL aren't 100% to where we were) trying to figure out where issues were. There were many updates, kb articles, and settings that were in the registry of that old machine, and simply migrating would have saved us MANY hours of work and thus problems.
Therefore I say p2v is better than a simple moving of databases and files over to a NEW environment, because that NEW environment things like system tweaks, power settings, screen saver, often those overlooked tweaks can significant, and then DNS / DHCP servers were migrated and the data was in tact, but the exclusions, and extra things like mailhost and domain weren't included, so those had to be done over, which takes time.
So my advice is to migrate especially with a large system like Exchange, I don't think you want to spent the next serveral weeks fixing what you ALREADY fixed before. All you want to do is move it to a VM, right?
Simplest solution is a p2v, and like I always say.. you get a free backup in the process. That physical machine can be a failsafe if the p2v doesn't work and you can do the p2v conversion later if you have to. I prefer making things easy rather than hard.
