Hello. Colin
There are two things you should consider:
- first is the difference between P2V and V2V. Although the 'P' in P2V used to stand for 'physical' it really means 'powered on' (this is what it actually reads in Converter UI for a few versions now). So you can P2V virtual machines but they have to be powered on. V2V OTOH requires them to be powered off.
- the second difference is how the traffic flows. In the case of P2V, the source machine pushes the data directly to the destination ESX host (Windows source) or the destination VM pulls the data directly from the source machine (Linux source); see user guide pp.11,12. In case of V2V however, the data traffic flows from the source VM through the Converter server to the destination VM. This may result in performance decrease. If your local machine is in a distant or slow network, this decrease may be dramatic.
HTH
Plamen