So I've got a request that is confusing me.
Environment: 6 host EX 4.1 U1 cluster. VM in question - Win2003
Enterprise, 32 bit
My boss tells me that I need to convert this from a VM back onto a
physical machine - for licensing reasons, this needs to be a physical
box, apparently.
So here's the big rub ... this VM is one of those mission-critical VMs.
Ordinarily, what I might have done is do a sysprep of the VM, and -
before shutting it down - do a full backup using EMC Networker. Then, I
would do a BMR (Bare Metal Recovery) of Windows on the new physical
hardware. (when doing a BMR, you install Windows and your backup client
on the new hardware. Then do a full restore, using the backup client, of
everything except the backup client program files). That way, after the
reboot at the end of the BMR, sysprep would run, find the new disk
controller drivers, etc, and not blue screen with inaccessible boot
device errors.
However, my boss has vetoed that idea, since we can't take any chances
with the VM perhaps not working after the sysprep. If that BMR doesn't
work, then I would need to turn the VM back on. and we have no
guarantees that it would continue to work the same after the sysprep, etc.
So my hands are tied that way.
Then I thought - well, we could still do a BMR, but without the sysprep
first. Just do a regular full backup, and then the BMR to the physical
box. And if it fails to boot, we would (maybe) do a Windows repair
installation, using the drivers for whatever disk controllers are in the
physical box. Doing the BMR won't overwrite any drives that would be
installed for the clean first-time Windows install, and so they'd still
be there for the repair installation to find. That way, either the
physical box would work, and I'd leave the VM powered off, or the
physical box would fail, and I would power the VM back up.
So: any hints on how I can take this VM, and put it on a new physical
box, make it work .. and still get the VM to boot afterwards, in case
the conversion to physical did not work? Basically, I need the reverse
of the P2V converter, where - if the virtualization fails - you can
still turn the physical box back on. I just need to do exactly that, but
in the other direction.
Thanks
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