We did that here with our SBS 2003 setup and a few old boxes that were actually as GC's etc. The SBS box was creaking along and blue screening so we P2V'd that and then went nuts and did the other old boxes.
We just P2V'd it in the same way you described, leaving the SBS physical box off after the p2v process. The only difference was that we did it via a 3rd party tool (shadowprotect) in to a blank VM as we were worried the sheer age of the SBS hardware would cause issues when we fired up the VM. Olly -- G2 Support Online Backups Email: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> Web: http://www.g2support.com From: David Lum [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: 07 January 2009 08:47 To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: P2V SBS aka two DC's Thanks guys. A brainstorm I had tonight was to demote the non SBS DC so I am effectively P2V-ing a one DC environment, and if all looks good then re-DCPROMO the former DC back to it's former glory. if P2V blows up I have the physical SBS machine still. I hate not having a solid back-out plan. Option C would be to power off the non SBS DC during the *entire* event, that way I maintain a DC if the P2V goes amazingly hayware and both new and old SBS burst into flames. I view backups as a latch ditch "plan Z", I like to have a non-backup/restore as plan B. I do realize I might be over cautious here since - as stated - my P2V test with the target new server & OS went fine, the only thing different for production is the box getting converted is different hardware than my test, which should hardly matter. The test environment P2V'd a "white box" ASUS system, the real system is a Dell PowerEdge so I think it should actually be more compatible. My VM setup is Server 2008 w/ Hyper-V and using System Center Virtual Machine Manager handling the P2V itself. Like VMWare, P2V-ing is crazy-easy, but I'd like to keep ol' Murphy at bay regardless.... Dave ________________________________ From: Benjamin Zachary - Lists [[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, January 06, 2009 6:22 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: P2V SBS aka two DC's I have had such good success with vmware convertor 3 (not 4 beta) I just get a good backup, convert it and run it. In all of the multiDC environments I have done this the only problem I ever run into is the time being off by too much. From: David Lum [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, January 06, 2009 17:25 To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: P2V SBS aka two DC's Has anyone here P2V'd a couple of DC's? I P2V'd an SBS server in test and it went fine - my concern is how to handle it in production when there's a SBS server AND a 2nd DC involved. At some point I need to make the 2nd DC think that the first DC was just powered off for a bit. Would it work if I: 1) Do an offline P2V (read: the system (ServerA) P2V does a PXE boot into the host Hyper-V machine to get VM'd), 2) Leave physical ServerA off once it's P2V'd 3) Bring up the VM of ServerA? My thinking here is each DC would just think ServerA was powered off for a few hours, does this sound correct? Question 2: If I need to roll back to physical ServerA....ServerB (the 2nd DC) will now have thought it's talked to ServerA since the P2V outage, but effectively ServerA will have suffered a time warp by several hours, right? David Lum // SYSTEMS ENGINEER NORTHWEST EVALUATION ASSOCIATION (Desk) 971.222.1025 // (Cell) 503.267.9764 ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
