asatoran,
You seem to know this topic very well :). Most of the machines that I plan to convert will not be put back into production, but rather for testing. The "convert" scares me. I am thinking that once it is converted to an image, the physical machine (that the image was copied off) will no longer be good for production.
Converter takes a snapshot image of the physical source server. Similar to Ghost or Trueimage. It does not alter physical source server durning the imaging. So the physical machine continues on it's merry way.
On a side note, I do have a windows 2000 member server that I like to get an image of and bring it back into production. What do I need to do to make sure the sid doesn't conflict with the live machine one that I copied off from (besides renaming the machine name & changing the IP address). Running sysprep by by choosing "custom" during converter menu as stated?
You want to just convert to a virtual machine? Or are you making a duplicate and want both the physical and virtual on the same production network at the same time? Above you state that you are doing this for testing. If what you want is to make a copy of the member server, leave the original in production and use the copy for testing, then yes that is possible. This is what I do all the time. My test network is isolated from my production network. So I have exact virtual copies of most of my servers. Because the networks are isolated from each other, there's no need in my case to change SID, machine name or IP address. In fact, I want them to be the same because I'm simulating the original network. But that's just my requirements.
When I convert a machine to virtual and put the virtual in production, I do so because I'm usually replacing the physical machine. They physical machine is removed from the network permanently so again, no issue with identical SID, machine name or IP address.
If you're trying to make multiple copies of an existing server because you want to use the source server as a template, then yes, you would use sysprep. Same as if you used Ghost or Trueimage to copy the HD of one server and put the copied HD into another server, then started up both servers. Now you have duplicate SID / name / IP unless you use sysprep. I don't have much experince with sysprep because fortunately for me, my networks are small and nost of the servers are not clustered so there's not much need to roll out standardized servers.
HTH, otherwise post again. :smileyblush:
