Physical-to-Virtual

In computing. Physical-to-Virtual ("P2V" or "p-to-v") involves the process of decoupling and migrating a physical server's operating system (OS), applications, and data from that physical server to a virtual-machine guest hosted on a virtualized platform.

User manually creates a virtual machine in a virtual host environment and copies all the files from OS, applications and data from the source machine.

Performing a P2V migration using a tool that assists the user in moving the servers from physical state to virtual machine.

Performing a P2V migration using a tool that migrates the server over the network without any assistance from the user.

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Wikipedia