Test Lab setup for large file server - how to advice needed

[neilpotter]

We have a Win 2008R2 File Server with a 100Mb Boot drive (Hard Disk 1) and a 6Tb data drive made up of 3 x 2Tb Drives under the VM setup that are Spanned in windows.

Trying to upgrade this machine to 2012 R2 but it keeps failing and rolling back, and with not a lot of info as to why in the logs.  So I'm guessing it could one of three or four 3rd party apps installed causing the problem, or something unknown, and my best bet may be to duplicate this machine into some sort of test lab so i can keep re-installing the 2012R2 upgrade, and messing around until I find what is stopping it.

Now with this being a large VM, I wanted to ask advice on

a) how I can duplicate just the boot drive element of the VM i.e. not carry over the 6Tb data drive too

b) put it into a test lab environment so that I can get it to connect to the internet, but sit on a different LAN so that my users can't see the duplicated version.

Any advice would be most welcome.

Or a third option may be for me to create a new 2012R2 VM and migrate the services over.  In this case, could I remove the spanned disk from one VM, and make it available to the new 2012R2 VM?

[jhague]

‌Are you able to power down the server and temporarily disconnect the disks and clone it? Are these VMDK disks or RDMs?

Alternatively you could look at VMware Convertor which would let you choose which disks you want to clone.

In terms of isolating the VM you could either disconnect the network adapters or put it on a port group without an uplink. Depends on exactly what you want to do...