A couple of years ago, we had a major need to eliminate some really old servers that were well beyond their last legs. Unfortunately, the workloads on the old servers couldn't be eliminated, so we needed to do something. At the time, PlateSpin had not yet been purchased by Novell and they were an early player in the P2V space and provided a fantastic product at a great price. Of course, some P2V functions are now handled by the hypervisor vendors.
My question for you: What P2V product have you found to be a best of breed tool and how much do you think you saved in man hours by not having to reinstall a bunch of services?
Right now i only convert a few box from P2V and the software that we use for this is the official from VMware, VMware Converter is a great tool for the task, anyway at the moment were i work virtualization isn't deployed at full glance and i hope that change in a near future.
Right now is minimal, we are running standalone ESXi since 2 years, but know we need HA on one of our important web app (Moodle) and after some IT Guys recommended us Hyper-V (As an University we have a large software agreement with MS) i managed to convince my boss that the best route was vSphere.
So now i`m waiting for the gear to arrive to start converting the Linux server running the web app and the MySQL to VMs.
No VDI atm, but i`m sure that VDI can be the next step in this new adventure with vSphere and VMware stuff..
We moved to Moodle this summer as well but decided to host it at MoodleRooms rather than in-house.
On the virtualization side, I looked at Hyper-V as well -- and I use it at home -- but given how important the virtual infrastructure is, also decided that VMware made a lot more sense for us.
Yesterday i managed to remove the last Hyper-V server that was hosting 2 VMs (SQL2005 and SmartFilter admin console) everything was better than we planned!