With VMware updating their P2V migrationg solution to VMware Converter 3.0.2 a few weeks ago, I was looking forward to finally trying it on my workstation.

It worked like a charm, and left positive impressions.

There are two kinds of VMware Converters: Starter Edition and Enterprise Edition.

I've used the Starter Edition, which is available as a free download. It supports only hot cloning of your desktop, which means the resulting image may be not perfect – your OS will be aware of being cloned.

Enterprise Edition comes with a boot cd which does a cold cloning, meaning you will get exactly the same image of your OS which wouldn't even suspect it was virtualized.

I liked the choice of the source and target environments for P2V conversion. Now only can you use a physical system (local and remote cloning options are available), but a number of most popular virtualization technologies and images is supported, like Microsoft Virtual PC or Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery image. And, naturally, alll the VMware own virtualization solutions can be used to convert your virtual machine from.

Destination environment also provides you with a choice between an image for VMware ESX server or a standalone virtual machine which can be used with VMware Workstation or VMware Player.

I'll play with the Converter a little more before I can write a full-scale review of it, but even at this early stage it appears to be one of the best and easy to use P2V solutions I've seen so far.

Have you tried VMware Converter yet? What do you think of it? Is there anything better? Let me know in the comments area.