3rd-party P2V solutions with Server 2008 Hyper-V?
- Hello,
Is anyone using any of the 3rd-party P2V products (from Leostream, Platespin, Vizioncore, etc) along with Windows Server 2008/Hyper-V? (Presumably a beta version)
thanks
Martin
Answers
There are 3rd party products that work, but intermitant success is the norm.
I have it narrowed down to one universal method which works fairly well. No matter if it is a P2V VMware or P2V MSVS 2005 or P2V Hyper-v the process is the same.
Download Acronis workstation which is a 15 day trial, Install this on the physical machine and do a full image of the boot drive (hopefully it is basic and not dynamic) send the image to a USB drive so you may transport it to a Lab system.
Next bite the bullet and purchase a licensed copy of Accronis workstation (just to be fair) and install this on a workstation or as I did on my laptop. Now using their software convert the image to a vhd file. Load the file in MSVS 2005 not Hyper-v
From here you enter into the world of "how bad is it" Best scenero the system will boot up fine but require instant activation. Worst case it will bluescreen or gray screen. In this case a full windows repair may fix it.
Once it is running move it over to hyper-v and load the addions (Integration Services)
The reason I clean up the image using Virtual server 2005 is simple - normally the mouse and most of the basics work so I can get around and work more efficiently. This is very difficult in Hyper-v as typically the mouse does may function at first along with other things like network etc.
I am sure this is not the best way but it's my way and I have developed a sense as to what to do when things don't quite cooparate.
If the Physical machine has the drives setup as dynamic - good luck as these are the worst but not to say it can't be done. Very few conversions are a slam dunk.
All Replies
There are 3rd party products that work, but intermitant success is the norm.
I have it narrowed down to one universal method which works fairly well. No matter if it is a P2V VMware or P2V MSVS 2005 or P2V Hyper-v the process is the same.
Download Acronis workstation which is a 15 day trial, Install this on the physical machine and do a full image of the boot drive (hopefully it is basic and not dynamic) send the image to a USB drive so you may transport it to a Lab system.
Next bite the bullet and purchase a licensed copy of Accronis workstation (just to be fair) and install this on a workstation or as I did on my laptop. Now using their software convert the image to a vhd file. Load the file in MSVS 2005 not Hyper-v
From here you enter into the world of "how bad is it" Best scenero the system will boot up fine but require instant activation. Worst case it will bluescreen or gray screen. In this case a full windows repair may fix it.
Once it is running move it over to hyper-v and load the addions (Integration Services)
The reason I clean up the image using Virtual server 2005 is simple - normally the mouse and most of the basics work so I can get around and work more efficiently. This is very difficult in Hyper-v as typically the mouse does may function at first along with other things like network etc.
I am sure this is not the best way but it's my way and I have developed a sense as to what to do when things don't quite cooparate.
If the Physical machine has the drives setup as dynamic - good luck as these are the worst but not to say it can't be done. Very few conversions are a slam dunk.
- so far what has worked for me is Symantec System Recovery. this product makes a bare metal image of the server. they have worked close with vmware and have integrated conversion to vmware disk. i image the box with system recovery, convert it to vmware disk then use vmdk2vhd to convert it to microsoft virtual server. so far the only thing i found is the vmware tools (if installed) need to be removed first. other than that it works like a dream.
i wish microsoft would work with symantec or acronis and get this worked out like vmware has done. - I have also used Acronis Workstation to transfer a physical machine to a virtual machine in the way described.
Be prepared to:
1. Break out your Windows CD to do a repair of the system. This is mostly because the virtual machine will have different HAL requirements (i.e. AMD processor instead of Intel).
2. Re-activate Windows. You will almost certainly have to call Microsoft. Be sure to following licensing requirements.
You can also do some neat things like expand or compress the hard drive partition used by the operating system being converted, but that will take some time. In one case, I shrunk the boot partition from 80GB down to 20GB (the entire install on the physical machine was only using 12GB) and it took me a full 18 hours to do the transfer. But once I repaired Windows using the XP CD, re-activated Windows, and got the additions installed, I was good to go.
JamesNT
"If you have to ask about various operating system limits, you're probably doing something wrong." -Raymond Chen
