x360Recover can backup both physical and virtual servers, and can export ESXi-compatible VMDK images. 

If a VM already exists on the ESXi host, doing a regular VMDK export and replacing the VMDKs on the ESXi host remains the best option for recovery. 

This has caused some people to believe, incorrectly, that x360Recover should always be the primary mechanism for performing a p2v into ESXi.  x360Recover should always work for exporting a protected system into ESXi, but it is not always the optimal tool for that task, particularly for multi-terabyte protected systems. 

For such large protected systems, the full backup, storage, and export take a significant amount of disk and time.  Please only use x360Recover VMDK export to perform a p2v into ESXi when the customer is in a production-down situation and the converter will not work.

Please use the VMware Converter Standalone application for non-critical migrations from physical servers into ESXi.  The converter communicates directly between the server to be virtualized and the ESXi host, and creates the target VM with a proper hardware configuration as well as raw disk data.  The converter can be downloaded here:

https://www.vmware.com/go/getconverter

If the protected system is running in live mode on a x360Recover appliance, it is possible to run the converter on the VM itself and run directly from live mode.  This will take longer, both due to the inherent penalties of reading from a compressed, encrypted ZFS pool, and the VMs being limited to a virtual 100Mbps adapter, but does allow for minimal downtime on migrations away from a failed server.

Much like x360Recover itself, the VMware converter tool also understands incremental synchronization, if it is running directly on the source system to be converted.  This means that the conversion process can be started in the background during business hours, with a final incremental conversion at the end of the day, to capture the rest of the day's changes.  

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