One of the first steps that many organizations take when they begin thinking outside the data center is to convert physical servers to virtual machines. An array of Physical-to-Virtual (P2V) tools can help systems administrators inspect a physical server’s filesystems; package up the operating system, the applications, and the data; and create a virtual machine image for a virtualized environment to replace the physical server.
Systems administrators who have lived through this conversion process often ask us whether RightScale offers any virtual-to-cloud tools that similarly forklift servers from a virtualized environment to a cloud. We don’t, and a better question is what the business benefits of such a tool would be.
Continue reading
