Update: Please, also check out my first impressions about VMware Converter 3.0 final.
I wonder how long VMware Converter 3.0 Starter Edition beta is already available. I only became aware of it because it was mentioned in a comment of a recent post about VMware Converter. Of course, I couldn’t wait to try it. VMware Converter is a P2V solution. It enables you to convert physical machines running Windows to VMware virtual machines. The Starter Edition is for free, the Enterprise Edition will be licensed as part of support and subscription services with VirtualCenter Management.

The Enterprise Edition allows multiple concurrent conversions, whereas the Starter Edition can only convert one machine at the same time. Another difference is that the Enterprise Edition supports cold cloning, i.e. the migration of powered off machines.

Since the OS of the source system isn’t running in a cold migration, the cloning process is less error prone. To cold clone a physical machine you have to boot from a Windows PE CD which will launch VMware Converter.

VMware Converter 3 has an easy-to-use wizard which guides you thru the configuration of the conversion task. At the first step you have to decide what kind of conversion you are planning. There are five options: physical computer, remote physical computer, VMware virtual machine, Microsoft virtual machine, and Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery or Ghost 9 image.

I tried to convert a remote physical computer which probably is the most common scenario. You have to tell VMware Converter the IP address and the credentials of the remote machine. Then you choose the disk volumes you want to convert. It is possible to enlarge the disk space during the conversion. You probably can also use this to resize the disks of a virtual machine. I didn’t try this, though.

VMware Converter installs an agent on the remote machine in order to copy the contents of the disks in a consistent state. The virtual machine files will be copied to a network share by this agent.

You can change several settings of the source system which will be applied to the virtual machine. For example, you can change the computer name, the Windows license and the security ID (SID) using Microsoft’s sysprep tool.

My test server was an old PC running Windows 2000 Server SP4. The installation of the agent was done within minutes. Afterwards the server had to reboot. Unfortunately, the conversion failed. It reached almost 100%, but then the transfer was cancelled. It seems I am not the only one who had this problem.

I then tried a machine with Windows Server 2003 SP1. This time the server didn’t reboot after the installation of the agent. But now the transfer was extremely slow. I had to cancel the conversion. I suppose this must be a bug too, since this server is much faster than the first one.

It seems that this beta version is not yet reliable enough. However, I think that VMware Converter will be a great tool if these problems are solved. Since we plan to convert several physical servers within the next months, I will keep an eye on it. Let me know if your test was more successful.