I have a Windows 2016 Server VM that I need to convert back to a physical machine.
Since Server 2012 moving machines was straightforward with the cloned drive. I could do this with the physical drives and just move them to another machine and it would configure windows drivers etc and update drivers etc.
I have not been able to successfully do a VM to Physical conversion with this and I'm wondering if anyone can give any help with this. Thanks
I was able to do this very easily with Macrium Reflect Server Edition which is not free. The free version is the non-server edition for Windows 10.
I posted the steps here previously 3 times now and it just won't show up.
That was it.
I am so glad I was able to do this migration in under 2 hours without
P2V and the reverse V2P is a 2 steps procedure.
Part one is the imaging part - and thats is quite easy. You use a LinuxLiveCD and then cloneing a vmdk to a dd-image is trivial.
With the dd-image you go to the physical machine and again clone dd-image to physical disk. One more boot with Linux and you can adjust the GPT or MBR to the physical disk. So that is the easy - straight forward part.
Part 2 - injecting missing drivers is trivial for P2V - as here the list of drivers is very short.
When you plan to do V2P the injection of missing drivers is not trivial at all - the hardware varies a lot and so collecting the drivers is not easy.
But if you create a USB-stick with all the required drivers before you boot the imported system for the first time - it is a manageable task.
But before you start such a migration - just consider the plan B.
The purpose of a V2P migration is to use the applications and the user-data of the VM.
To acchieve that it is probably much easier - to simply write a batch that silently installs all the apps you need on the physical machine.
For V2P of a Linux VM that would be definetely the easier road.
I would also recommend to do a fresh installation when ever you have to deal with a system that uses EFI-firmware.
For best performance you would always prefer the fresh install over a migration.
Have you considered what a V2P migration might do with your Windows-server activation and licensing ?
Ulli
I was able to do this very easily with Macrium Reflect Server Edition which is not free. The free version is the non-server edition for Windows 10.
I posted the steps here previously 3 times now and it just won't show up.
That was it.
I am so glad I was able to do this migration in under 2 hours without