Converting a physical server to a Hyper-V virtual machine (a process known as Physical-to-Virtual or P2V) using Disk2vhd involves capturing the physical drives into a virtual hard disk file (.vhdx) and attaching that file to a newly created virtual machine (VM) in Hyper-V Manager.
Disk2vhd is a lightweight, free utility from Microsoft’s Sysinternals suite. It leverages Windows Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) to create consistent disk images while the source server stays fully online. Step 1: Prepare and Capture the Physical Server
Download Disk2vhd: Grab the utility directly from the official Microsoft Sysinternals Disk2vhd Page.
Run as Administrator: Extract the ZIP folder on the physical target server, right-click disk2vhd.exe, and select Run as administrator. Configure Image Settings:
Check Use VHDX to enable the modern, resilient virtual disk format.
Check Use Volume Shadow Copy to ensure a crash-consistent backup without downtime.
Select Destination: Specify a file path to save the .vhdx output. Save this to an external drive or a network share, as saving it onto the same disk being copied can tank performance.
Select Volumes: Check the boxes for the boot/system volume (usually C: and the System Reserved partition).
Click Create: Wait for the tool to finish. Multiple partitions on the same physical drive will automatically be consolidated into a single .vhdx file. Step 2: Create the Virtual Machine in Hyper-V Hyper-V P2V using Disk2vhd
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