Wave II - Server Migration (P2V)
Beginning about 4 years ago early adopters began the practice of P2V or Physical-to-Virtual. This involves running an agent that converts the hard drives of a physical server into virtual hard drives incorporated into a virtual server. Each of the "core" virtualization providers (VMware, XenSource, Parallels, etc.) provide this capability for their brand of virtualization. Additionally, some Open Source utilities like Ultimate-P2V, and commercial products from LeoStream and PlateSpin (just acquired by Novell), have the ability to output from a physical server to multiple virtualization formats.

There is definitely one huge "pro" for organizations that aggressively do this style of server migration; the complete decoupling of your hardware capital investment from your software capital investment. What is the rule once you get a piece of software installed and running on a server? Answer: DON'T TOUCH IT - EVER!!! NEVER! P2V lets you break this rule with relative impunity. Once you have migrated a given hardware server to its virtualized server counterpart, you can actually move it to more powerful hardware over time. You can even move it to run in a different physical location with only small risk. Good stuff - IT gets a structural agility in a key dimension.

What is the big "con"? Basically you have migrated your legacy into the future. It was low risk - but where you once had big, bloated, over-provisioned, hardware servers with generational accretion of software bits of unknown provenance, you now have big, bloated, over-provisioned, virtual servers with generational accretion of software bits of unknown provenance. Because these are virtual bloatware, you aren't going to get much of a gearing ratio between your new virtual servers and the underlying hardware. Maybe you can now run 2 VMs on one server, but in some cases you might end up running only one VM on a physical server. BUT, you gained the ability to manage the two streams (hardware and software) separately, which does help. See this recent article where a smart CIO has gained from a Wave II approach, but he cautions "When assessing the cost of converting to a virtual environment, it's important to realize that virtualization requires additional network storage since it takes 20 GB to load the OS of a virtual machine." There, on the topic of Wave II bloatware - I rest my case. Wave III eliminates this problem and allows you much higher numbers of VMs per physical server.

P2V