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We have a VM hosted windows running an important application. We need to migrate this application to actual physical server. Is there a way we can transfer entire running VM image to bare new physical machine withour loosing VMs data and configuration ? Something like VM replica to physical machine ! Thanks in advance.

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What is your issue with just copying the virtual disks' contents over to their physical counterparts and editing the BCD to match the new disk configuration? If your OS is Server 2008 R2 or newer, use the Bare Metal Recovery feature of Windows Server Backup to back up your virtual system and restore it on the physical one. – syneticon-dj Feb 22 at 11:43
DOnt even need to do that - windows since 2008R2 IIRC can happily boot from a vhd / vhdx file. THat is physical - the boot loader can run from vhd. – TomTom Feb 22 at 11:46
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Have you tried the following, boot both vm and physical machine with linux cd. then you dd the drive other the network to the physical machine. In theory it should work, as dd will disc copy 1:1 to the physical medium. Just make sure that you have the same sized partitions on the physical machine, else you can later resize it. Lastly, you can also use something like clonezilla, it's awesome cloning software and it will probably be more user friendly than running dd manually. – Danie Feb 22 at 13:15

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