Physical-to-Virtual — or P2V for short — is the process of moving a physical server to a virtual server. That entails moving whatever is on the server — operating system, all applications, drivers, settings and all data — everything. But if the physical server is highly fragmented, reads and writes are taking longer than necessary, and you’ll run into a problem with the virtual environment being much slower than necessary. Virtualizing a fragmented and inefficient physical server gives you a fragmented and inefficient virtual server.
A better option is to free up and clear out space on the physical driver first. A typical way to do this is with the manual SDelete command-line utility. But it’s cumbersome, time-and resource-intensive, manual, and prone to human error. An alternative to SDelete for performing P2V is PerfectDisk’s Zero Fill. The steps involved in the 2 scenarios for Physical-to-Virtual are outlined here.
With SDelete
- Defrag with Windows Built-in Defrag.
- Shut down applications and services that may require disk space.
- Run SDelete command line manually to zero out all free space on drive.
- Restart applications and services.
- Repeat steps 2 – 4 for all drives.
With PerfectDisk Zero Fill
- With a single click, consolidate free space and move all files to beginning of the drive.
PerfectDisk Zero Fill — the simple, powerful and automated alternative to SDelete. Smarter.
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