I recently bought new hardware for my home server. Just a simple celeron board, nothing heavy. But the SATA chip is compatible with the free vmware esxi. So I switched my home linux server from a physical server to a VM. Here are my terse notes on moving a linux p2v (physical to virtual).

Boot the vm from knoppix and start netcat listening for a disk image
nc -l -p 9001 | gunzip | dd of=/dev/sda

On the physical machine (I did it live becuase it moves slow), netcout out. The 192.168 address is the vm's IP from knoppix+dhcp.
dd if=/dev/sda | gzip | nc 192.168.0.25 9001 -q 10

getting dd progress, use another console run
kill -USR1

vmware console; alt+f1, "unsupported", root password.

Busybox and some custom vmware stuff. That's it. No ssh, no inetd.

I did it over a 802.11G wireless bridge, so a bit slow.