Physical Server Restore to VM

[ITGURU]

I backup my physical servers using Windows Server Backup - all fine if a hyper-v is restore to hyper-v , or physical to physical.

However, as soon as I try to restore a physical backup to a VM it fails as says the disk in the BIOS is not large enough or words to that effect so it won't restore (running the 2012 r2 disk and select repair my computer and selecting the backup)

 

All physical servers have a 146 RAID 1 array, so i create a 150gb fixed size VM, but still get the same error.

 

What am i doing wrong or is this not possible? I'm thinking for Disaster recovery purposes if a physical server blew up and didn't have a spare physical server, how i'd recover it toa VM - all backups are selected with bare metal recovery included.

[NB9457]

Not sure if this is much help, but for our old physical servers, we made VHDs and used 'Disk2VHD' to create a copy of the server should it ever fail which we can then spin up as VM, we update it manually every few months and do the normal file level backup daily.

[ITGURU]

Not sure if this is much help, but for our old physical servers, we made VHDs and used 'Disk2VHD' to create a copy of the server should it ever fail which we can then spin up as VM, we update it manually every few months and do the normal file level backup daily.

 

Didn't particularly want to keep 2 backups - also any issues with running p2v on a live exchange server?!

[NB9457]

Didn't particularly want to keep 2 backups - also any issues with running p2v on a live exchange server?!

 

I've never had issues running it on a live machine.

 

Perhaps the best bet would kick it off on a weekend?

[TechieWils]

As long as you disable all the exchange services and make sure nothing is accessing the database, running p2v on a live Exchange server should be fine. I did it before and then decommissioned the live server. Span up the VM in Hyper-V and attached the VHD files. Worked fine for the 3 month's I had it before we moved across to O365.

 

Obviously have a full backup just in case.

[PotNoodleTech]

It's usually not possible to restore from a windows backup of a physical machine, onto a VM because the motherboard, storage, network,etc drivers are different enough as to not be recognised within the new VM.

[ITGURU]

It's usually not possible to restore from a windows backup of a physical machine, onto a VM because the motherboard, storage, network,etc drivers are different enough as to not be recognised within the new VM.

 

Thought thats why there is a 'bare metal' option when backing up, so after it's restored and rebooted it will install devices/drivers

[roc1479]

Disk2VHD will do what you're looking to do. It basically creates either a VHD or VHDX which will contain an entire image for you to use with your Hypervisor. You'd then copy the vhd or vhdx to your hypervisor, create a vm, give it appropriate ram, cpu etc and use the vhd or vhdx as the hard drive.

 

Should boot right up. You may have to reconfigure network.

[KK20]

x years ago when I moved my physical to virtual (2008R2 era) I did the same as you, windows backup and windows restore. the drive sizes for the VMs were IDENTICAL in size (to the Mb) as the physical. It worked a charm. Exchange and SQL server moved across but I demoted the DC first before backing up and restoring (then promoted) - I did not restore a "live" DC. I encountered no errors in the process.

 

Windows backup (at least in the 2008R2 era) was bare metal aware. As long as the storage drivers were recognised (and as a VM it was) then it should restore.

Edited February 26, 2018 by KK20