Planning for existing systems
If you will be moving existing software loads into your new Hyper-V Server cluster, you'll need to determine what sort of resources they'll need to have access to. If you followed the earlier chapter, you've already determined which workloads cannot be virtualized. If not, make that determination before you start gathering metrics.
Deciding how you will virtualize physical systems
There are two basic approaches to moving physical systems into a Hyper-V Server cluster. The first is to perform a physical-to-virtual (P2V) conversion. The P2V process is a direct transfer of an operating system environment installed directly on hardware that copies it into a virtual equivalent. Aside from the hardware components, the server and installed applications do not change. The second approach is to create an empty virtual operating system environment and migrate applications and data.
Both P2V and migration approaches have their merits and drawbacks. P2V has a much higher...