Questions[v2p](server)

I am faced with a Windows hardware/software problem left over from another person. It's on me to resolve. It's a mission critical setup. The situation is:

I've got a physical server machine with:

-Disk C:\ (one disk) containing a basic install of Windows Server 2008 R2, formerly Win Vista Pro, now gone.

-Disk D:\ (software Raid) containing a VirtualBox disk image of a configured Windows Server 2008 R2 running SQL Server R2 among others.

What shall I do now?

• Migrate all the stuff from the configured VM to the basic but
  natively installed C:\ Windows Server 2008 R2 (with the possibility
  of breaking stuff)? Or,

• Setting up the machine to "natively boot" the VM with the help of bcdedit.exe (something I've read about, what I've never done, what I don't know of if it works, if it hits performance, or if it is stable for production)

For me, being old skool, I am in the process of de-virtualising everything (option 1). But I'd be happy if someone suggests I am ok to go down the "natively boot" route.

I have a Ubuntu Server 8.04 VM set up with VMware. Is there any way to take this image and make it not a virtual machine. i.e. put it on a real machine.

If there is absolutely no way to do it, what are some tips/tools/tricks to make the transition as easy as possible. There's tons of pre-release software that needs an absurdly specific configuration to run, and the documentation for installing it is essentially non-existant.

Also, just to complicate things, VMware is running on a Mac Pro.

Is there a program which will allow me to convert a VMware guest host VM into a physical image?

I know how to go P2V, but I need to go V2P.

Virtualization has some great benefits, but there are times when a virtualized server needs more performance and should be moved to physical.

My question is, how do you tell when these times are? I'm looking for measurable data and metrics that show moving a server to its own physical box would make a significant difference to performance. Personally I'm interested in Windows but presumably the essentials are the same across all platforms.

We have a number of VMWare Server 2.0 virtual machines that were created using VMWare Converter (It copies a physical machine to a virtual machine). If we need to convert the virtual machine back to a physical machine is there way to accomplish this easily? Essentially doing the VMWare Converter process in reverse.