Your general plan sounds decent and, as other have mentioned, your concerns could probably be overcome with a pre-sysprep snapshot. But, why not go a step further and create a copy of the .vmdk file and try the migration with that while the original sits safely turned off?
-----Original Message----- From: Mike Leone [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Monday, November 14, 2011 10:37 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: OT - converting a VMware VM back to a physical box 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 ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to [email protected] with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to [email protected] with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin
