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34 Containers For Dummies, HPE and Docker Special Edition These materials are © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited. Migrating those workloads manually would be a huge chore — about as huge as manually migrating physical servers to virtual machines was just a few years ago. A manual process would mean basically going from scratch. You'd have to install a new OS, rein- stall applications, and then migrate all the files and users from the old to the new. It would be highly time consuming and highly risky. Back then, though, a number of companies came to the rescue by creating what became known as physical-to-virtual (P2V) tools. By running these tools, in just a short amount of time, admin- istrators could create snapshots of a physical server that they converted to a virtual machine and then simply deploy without having to reinstall all the OS and application underpinnings. It transformed a process that would have taken weeks into one that took hours and was critical to the overall success of early virtual- ization efforts. For container users, the beginning to such an ecosystem is developing. The first entrant into this space is an open-source tool called Image2Docker. It won't work with every application on your server. For example, you're not going to containerize your Exchange Server with it. However, if you're a development shop and have a lot of web-based applications running across a multi- tude of Windows Servers with IIS, Image2Docker may be a gold- mine for you. Image2Docker can scan your WIM, VHD, and VHDX files — all which are standard Windows Server deployment template or vir- tual machine formats — and extract from them a Docker image for each website in each location. In other words, if you have ten such files, each with ten ASP.NET web applications running in separate IIS instances, Image2Docker can automate the creation of a Dockerfile for each of these 100 applications for you. Again, you're not bringing Exchange to Docker (yet), but there is nothing stopping you from bringing containers to your in-house applications. Although container deployments aren't quite as straightforward and "no brainer" as virtualization deployments were, compa- nies like HPE and Docker have significant resources that can be brought to bear for you, so you don't have to go it alone.