This article is presented to you as a tool for performing virtual-to-physical conversions because it is universally applicable to any target hardware environment. However, because it is target-neutral, the steps presented here could very easily be adapted to other situations. For instance:

• Virtual-to-virtual conversions for which there is no applicable tool
• Physical-to-virtual conversions
• VHDX-to-physical conversions //

Virtual-to-Physical Conversions are Not Ideal

My first recommendation is: find another way. Even though V2P is possible, it has a fairly high chance of being unsuccessful even with your best effort. A preferred approach would be migration. Install the desired operating system on the new hardware and migrate settings and applications. Most software vendors have a documented method for performing this. You are almost guaranteed to prefer the process and results over a V2P.

If you’re using Hyper-V Server and you’re converting a VM running a recent version of Windows, you could install the OS on the physical hardware and then mount the VHDXs directly inside the new operating system and transfer files via copy, xcopy, robocopy, Windows Explorer, etc.. //

The very first thing you must do is take a complete backup of the machine to be converted. You are going to absolutely rework this machine from bottom to top, things are almost definitely going to go wrong, and your sole saving grace will be a good backup. //

Your virtual machine should be off before proceeding. You’ve got a clean virtual machine, but what you need is a clean image. The easiest way to proceed from here will be to use some form of imaging software. There is any number of solutions available, but these directions will use Clonezilla Live. If you have some other product, the process should be similar.

There are two basic methods to perform a clone. One is over the network, the other is is by hard drive transfer. I’ll show you the basic setup operations for each method, and then in the next section, I’ll go through running Clonezilla with appropriate branches to fit your method.