How long will it take to convert physical machine to virtual machine

Question

I want to convert my physical machine to a virtual machine using vmware converter. Here are the specs of my computer

And here are the programs I have installed:

All in all, it drive c consumes 43 Gb. How long do you think it will take to convert this machine to a virtual one, that I could just bring anywhere and use my installed applications. Or do you know of a way in just making a virtual hard drive out of it? So that I could just mount it on any windows 7 system. So that I could make full use of the speed of the machine that I'm going to put it on.

Answer 1

I think converting it to a VM is the easiest way.

I've done it just a few weeks ago with an old Subnotebook. The OS was horribly slow and the disk was broken. I only got a throughput of 1,5-5 MB/s. I needed about 10 hours for 20GB - despite using GB-Ethernet.

I think the bottlenecks are the network connection and/or the disk. In the end it's all (almost) about copying data.

Answer 2

I converted a physical machine with a Core2 processor, and a disk with 140 GB of data. The VM went onto another drive.

The conversion was surprisingly slow - it took about 12-14 hours.

If I was in your position with the machine specs you have, I'd run it overnight. It will likely take somewhere more than 6-8 hours.

---

At the end of that process I have the original machine in a VM which I can use on my Win7 box, which sounds much like what you want to do. It should perform OK. Expect windows to want to install a bunch of new device drivers, so when bringing up the new VM it may take a few reboots to get all running nicely.