P2P Migration is the transfer and migration of a functioning operating system from one computer to another.
Transferring a system to a machine with different hardware – P2P Migration
Acronis Backup products are primarily designed for creating disk images. You can then use these disk images to clone computers. Simply create a backup of computer number 1 and restore it to computer number 2. If both computers have identical hardware, any product from the Acronis Backup family will be sufficient for this operation (the Workstation edition for desktop operating systems, the Server edition for server operating systems). However, if the source and target computers have different hardware, we would encounter a driver issue, just as with V2P migration. The target computer would use the drivers of the source computer, and these would not work on the target computer.
It will therefore be necessary to use the Acronis Universal Restore component, which will provide the required driver replacement on the target machine. The procedure is explained in the following steps.
1) Create a backup of the source computer and save it so that it is accessible to the target computer
2) Boot the target computer using Acronis bootable media with the Acronis Universal Restore add-on
3) Select the restoration of the backup created on the source computer. Choose to use the Universal Restore add-on and, if necessary, add your own drivers
4) Perform the restoration
5) After restoring the target machine, restart it
The result will be two computers that are hardware-wise different but software-wise identical. It does not matter if the source and target hard drives are different sizes; Acronis allows you to “expand or shrink” the backup according to the size of the target disk. Acronis even allows you to change the SID identifier, so if you want to run both computers on the same network, there will be no address conflict.
Example of P2P Migration use – old server system on new hardware
A company decides to purchase a new server. The company is critically dependent on this server. Acquiring the hardware is not a problem, but it would take days to install and, above all, configure the new server. With the Acronis Backup backup solution, you create a backup of the old server and use Acronis bootable media with the Universal Restore add-on to restore this backup to the new server within 20 minutes. The result is a new, more powerful server that requires no configuration because it has inherited all the settings of the old server. Acronis Backup and Acronis Universal Restore have migrated the server to new hardware – and this new server will also be reliably backed up.
Server migration to a virtual environment.
It is even easier to transfer a physical machine to a virtual environment. You can read about this option in the article on P2V migration.