VMware VCENTER CONVERTER STANDALONE 4.3 User Manual page 13

Remote Hot Cloning of Physical Machine Sources That Are Running Windows
You can use the Conversion wizard to set up conversion tasks and Converter Standalone components perform
all of the cloning tasks.
The following workflow is an example of remote hot cloning in which the physical machine being cloned
experiences no downtime.
1 Converter Standalone prepares the source machine for the conversion.
Converter Standalone installs the agent on the source machine and the agent takes a snapshot of the source
volumes.
source
powered-on
physical machine
agent
source
volumes
2 Converter Standalone prepares the virtual machine on the destination machine.
Converter Standalone creates a virtual machine on the destination machine and the agent copies volumes
from the source machine to the destination machine.
source
powered-on
physical machine
agent
source
volumes
3 Converter Standalone completes the conversion process.
The agent installs the required drivers to allow the operating system to boot in a virtual machine and
personalizes the virtual machine (changes the IP information, for example).
VMware, Inc.
network
snapshot
network
snapshot
Chapter 1 Introduction to VMware vCenter Converter Standalone
vCenter Converter Standalone running
on Windows machine
destination
ESX/ESXi
vCenter Converter Standalone running
on Windows machine
destination
ESX/ESXi
VM
copied
volumes
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