Help with physical to virtual - not your typical scenario

[bowhuntr09]

Hi All,

I have a very unusual situation. We have a Dell 2650 which is running W2K and has a failed member in it's RAID5 array. The system keeps trying to regerate the disk data but fails and just starts the process over and over. I have tried to P2V this box 2 times using the cold clone method but each time after 24 hours the box rebooted and since cold clones can't be restarted I was back to square one. My latest attempt was to build a VM using W2K, get it to the same patch level as the physical machine, load the netbackup client and restore my backup of the physical machine to the virtual machine. Due to differing hardware between the physical and virtual this resulted in a machine that wouldn't boot.

Has anyone had any luck with restoring a tape backup of a physical server to a VM instance? My next attempt may be to just cold clone the C: drive because I think that will complete before the 24 hour spontaneous reboot happens and then just dump the data from the E: from tape to the VM. Anyone have any other ideas of how I can manage to get this machine to VM form?

[vmroyale]

Hello.

My latest attempt was to build a VM using W2K, get it to the same patch level as the physical machine, load the netbackup client and restore my backup of the physical machine to the virtual machine.

Do you have the Bare Metal Restore option? That is probably going to be the only way to get this to work properly.

My next attempt may be to just cold clone the C: drive because I think that will complete before the 24 hour spontaneous reboot happens and then just dump the data from the E: from tape to the VM.

This sounds like a good idea for the next attempt. The OS volume is the one you really need to convert right now - the data is easily restored later via NetBackup.

Good Luck!

[bowhuntr09]

Unfortuantely I don't have the BMR option any longer. We had it set up for a couple of years but never really used it so we did away with it. Both times this weekend it looked like the cold clone managed to get all the way through C: and about half way through E: before the spontaneous reboot. Maybe I will ahve better luck this weend just doing C:.

[azn2kew]

Sounds good just to P2V the C:\systems first so the VMs are converted and booted properly and create additional E:\ drive and neither restore from backup or use Robocopy to copy all the contents over if not loaded with any LiveCD and extract the data. The onlyl problem with moving data is if you have different shares/permissions for the drives it has to be recreated or restored from backup might keep all the settings. Good luck!

If you found this information useful, please consider awarding points for "Correct" or "Helpful". Thanks!!!

Regards,

Stefan Nguyen

VMware vExpert 2009

iGeek Systems Inc.

VMware, Citrix, Microsoft Consultant