P2P migration using Sysinternals Disk2VHD and VHD2Disk

Having successfully performed P2V migrations, why is there a need to do a P2P migration?

In this particular case, the reasons are

1. There are specific hardware requirements for an attached device or licensing service

2. The hardware requirements is also for an EOL windows 2003 server

The method I used for this migration requires 2 cycles of the imaging and restoring:

- Using Disk2VHD from Sysinternals, I created a VHD of the necessary OS and data disks.

- I then transferred the VHD to a physical disk using VHD2Disk, provided by wooxo.com. This was done to a disk attached to the DVD SATA port on a computer that had the necessary disk controller installed (the destination server is a HP Proliant with a smart array controller for RAID5 support - this will not work out of the box for a windows 2003 system as the drivers cannot be pre-installed using DPInst). VHD2Disk will work off a installation USB of windows 10, which I happened to have lying around. (It won't just run off any live CD or USB, due to some required components). Boot up into the recovery console command prompt, and you can run the 32 or 64 bit version of VHD2Disk from there.

- On booting windows from the disk, the necessary disk controller drivers are installed.

- We are now ready to transfer the disk back to image, then back to disk on the actual server, using another round of Disk2VHD, then VHD2Disk, again using the Windows 10 installation USB boot disk.

The result - the same server has been moved to a different hardware to live out the rest of it's serviceable life - do note that since it's windows 2003, we will be actively looking for an alternative solution to meet our requirements.