OVF export fails. Trying to move 2x VM's to SSD's on the same server

[bsmitty]

Hello all,

Im looking for some help getting 2 Server 2008 R2 VM's backed up so I can move them to a SSD raid 1 array on the same server. Currently ESXi 5.1.0 free eddition is running on a Dell PE T610 with 2x quad cores and 24GB of ram. The PERC raid controller was originally configured with 3x 250gd scsi drive in raid 5. Then in ESXi 2 VM's were created for each Windows server 2008. with in each of the VM's, 2 Virtual disks, one for the OS one for DATA.  One server is the DC the other is running just Exchange 2010. The DC has a 40GB C: virtual drive for the OS and a 150GB 😧 virtual drive for DATA storage. The Exchange server  had a 40GB virtual drive for the OS and a 200GB virtual disk for the DATA/Exchange data base. All thickly provisioned.  Bare metal backups of both windows servers using windows backups runs nightly to a in house NAS.

My Goal is to have just the 2 VM's OS's (C:) booting off the 250GB SSD's in a mirror array, and have the 2 DATA (D:) Virtual disks on the RAID 5 that currently everything is running on.

What I have done thus far. I have tried using a Acronis true image to image the whole server up then try to place it back on the SSD's then delete the DATA drives and extend the OD drive to fill the SSD's because the OS vdrives are about full . That fail as the entire size is close to 500GB and I have about 250GB available on the SSD's in RAID 1. I was hoping it only imaged up only the data being used which in total is about 200GB. But that dint work.

Next brought the entire server down pulled the 3 RAID 5 drives out. Put the 2 SSD's and installed the latest version of ESXi. create the 2 VM's Then what the plan was to boot off a server 2008 R2 disk and try to a bare metal restore from the windows backups on the NAS. But I had no way of pointing the recovery selection on the windows disk to the nas as the DC that hands DHCP and DNS was offline and i could only browse locally on the server. Also tried to get a external usb hd with the images on them mounted but that didnt work either. So i gave up on this night as it was about 4am and the company had to open at 8am so I had to get everything back up and running.
The next night I tried to use the export OVF Template utility which backed the DC up fine (~70GB backed up), but the Exchange server failed and has failed no matter what I have read what to try.It estimated ~230 minutes to backup but then fails with ~20 minutes left every time. Ive read that some admin have had issues with Virtual Drives <200GB. There is 240GB provisioned on the the 2 drives for this server but only 120GB of data are being used across both drives.  So now Im at a loss of how to get this done.

I was thinking of removing the DATA Virtual drive. The trying to back up the os then manually creating the DATA drive after I get both VM's to boot on the SSD"s. But if this does not work can I still revert back and add the Virtual Disk back in with out any issues? Im testing this remotely so I dont want to much risk involved getting back to a working state in case I can not back it up.

If anyone can give me some pointers Id appreciate it. Thanks