Sysinternals Disk2vhd Announced

The Sysinternals folks today announced a new utility called Disk2vhd. As you might guess from the name, it creates a virtual hard drive from a running machine.

So, just as you could use VMware vCenter Converter to create VMware images of live machines, you can now do the same for Microsoft’s Hyper-V or Virtual PC.

Some interesting wrinkles to this one:

The difference between Disk2vhd and other physical-to-virtual tools is that you can run Disk2vhd on a system that’s online. Disk2vhd uses Windows’ Volume Snapshot capability, introduced in Windows XP, to create consistent point-in-time snapshots of the volumes you want to include in a conversion. You can even have Disk2vhd create the VHDs on local volumes, even ones being converted (though performance is better when the VHD is on a disk different than ones being converted).

I haven’t tried it (pretty much a VMware guy) but it looks like great addition to the toolkit for those folks using Microsoft’s virtualization programs.

Possibly Related posts:

1. VMware Fusion 2 Beta
2. Virtual Conversion Virtually Ugly
3. VMware ESXi Goes Free — Hmmm…
4. A Twist on Running IE6 and IE7 on a Single Machine
5. Things I’ve learned this week