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Thorny
Contributor
Contributor

P2V SBS2003 DR plan

Hi Guys,

I am trying to use vmware converter to create a vm of a physical SBS2003 server for potential future DR purposes (ie cheap).

I have installed converter 4.0.0 build 146302 onto the server and run it but it fails at 95% (starting reconfiguration), the host server then blue screens and reboots. It has done this twice.

I have successfully booted the VM on another machine after deleting the lock files, but obviously I am quite concerned about the blue screen.

The physical server is an HP DL120 with HW RAID1 for the OS and iscsi attached SAN for data drive. I have tried just converting the C drive with the same result.

I have attempted to look at the logs, but they don't include information regarding the failure, only info when I started the conversion and no errors are shown.

Can anyone give me any tips as to why the blue screen might be occuring and if I am going about the conversion correctly?

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2 Replies
AndreTheGiant
Immortal
Immortal

You cannot do live convert of a server with some open DB. And you cannot stop the AD.

So you have to do a cold conversion using Converter ISO (but you need vCenter Server license).

Andre

**if you found this or any other answer useful please consider allocating points for helpful or correct answers

Andrew | http://about.me/amauro | http://vinfrastructure.it/ | @Andrea_Mauro
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asatoran
Immortal
Immortal

Because the fail is at th 95% reconfig phase, the blue screen is more likely due to Converter not successfully injecting the virtual SCSI drivers. Whether you're going to get AD errors is another issue. I've successfully converted a DC / Exchange server (not SBS) and it often converts AD without error as long as no one is logged on the network. Normally, these P2V is for testing purposes, so having to restore AD after the P2V is not a big deal in my case.

That said, one workaround I've used for Converter failing in reconfig phase is to create a new blank VM in Workstation or Server (not ESX) with IDE disks instead of SCSI. Windows will use it's built-in drivers for IDE rather than needing the Buslogic or LSI SCSI drivers. Once I've booted the VM, I can manually installed the SCSI drivers and convert the virtual drives to SCSI, if I need to move the VM to an ESX server. A lot of steps, but it's no cost, just labor.

If you have the "restore anywhere" option in an imaging program like Acronis Trueimage or Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery (a.k.a.: Ghost), then your could image your physical machine and restore it into a new blank VM, using the "restore anywhere" feature of the imaging program to inject the drivers. (IOW, use the imaging program to do the P2V, rather than Converter.) I tried this with BESR and like Converter, the injecting of the SCSI drivers sometimes works, sometimes fails. (Other than restore to a VM with IDE disks.) So no real solution there, just an alternative.

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