Category Archives: Backups

Calling x64 CLI Tools in x86 Scripting Tools and Processes

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Every now and then I get the same question from people who only recently decided to make the switch to x64 bit Windows operating systems. I’ve been running on x64 since Vista RTM and I’m very happy with it. When those people start scripting with their tools, which are 32 bit, calling some CLI tool in %windir%System32 they can run into an annoying issue that express itself in the correct yet somewhat misleading “WshShell.Exec: The system cannot find the file specified.”. But you know it’s there in %windir%System32, you checked and double checked!

When your scripting tool is 32 bit and you run your script it usually launches an 32 bit version of the CLI tool you’re calling. This behavior is a result of file redirection. This is a transparent process that’s part of the Windows-on-Windows 64-bit (WOW64) subsystem that is used to run 32 bit apps. When a 32 bit applications calls a CLI tool in the %windir%system32 directory it silently redirects this to the %windir%SysWOW64 where 32 bit apps can happily run without a worry on an x64 bit operating system. Yes, indeed %windir%system32 is for x64 code only and %windir%SysWOW64 is for 32 bit code.

What’s in a name 🙂 Some people argue they should have use system32 for 32 bit and system64 for x64 bit but I’m sure they had their reasons for what they did (i.e. it would have been hell for some reason I guess). Other suggestions have also been made by people who are far better qualified than I am. For example by Mark Russinovich, a hard core systems developer, in http://blogs.technet.com/b/markrussinovich/archive/2005/05/07/running-everyday-on-64-bit-windows.aspx.

Now all this can happen transparently for the user if the tools used have both an x64 and a x86 version. Cmd.exe and ping.exe are fine examples. If you run some VBScript in my favorite scripting tool for example (Sapiens PrimalScript) which is 32 bit it will launch a 32 bit cmd.exe, that launches the cscript.exe 32 bit version and which will launch ping.exe (using WScript.Shell) in %windir%SysWOW64 by silently redirecting your %windir%system32 path. No worries, you don’t know any better and the result is the same. So it’s usually not a problem if there is both a x64 and a x86 version to the CLI tool as you have seen in the ping.exe example. When a 32 bit process calls a tool in %windir%system32 it’s redirected to %windir%SysWOW64 and uses the 32 bit version. No harm done.

The proverbial shit hits the fan when you call a CLI tool that only has a x64 bit version. As the scripting tool is x86 it’s call is redirected to the WOW64 and the script fails miserably as the CLI tool can’t be found. This can be pretty annoying when writing and testing scripts. The CLI backup tool of Windows Backup is a prime example. It does not have a 32 bit version. Consider this little script for example:

Option Explicit

Dim oShell
Dim oExecShell
Dim sBackupCommandString
Dim sText

Set oShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
'sBackupCommandString = "%windir%sysnativewbadmin get disks"
sBackupCommandString = "%windir%system32wbadmin get disks"

Set  oExecShell = oShell.Exec(sBackupCommandString)

Do While oExecShell.Status = 0
    Do While Not oExecShell.StdOut.AtEndOfStream
        sText = oExecShell.StdOut.ReadLine()
        Wscript.Echo sText 
    Loop    
Loop

Set oShell = Nothing
Set oExecShell = Nothing

There is a lot of File Redirection going on here to %windir%SysWOW64 when running this code in the 32 bit scripting tool. That tool launches the 32 bit cmd.exe and thus the 32 bit cscript.exe which then launches a 32 bit shell and tries to run "%windir%system32wbadmin get disks" which is also redirected to %windir%SysWOW64 where wbadmin cannot be found throwing the error: “WshShell.Exec: The system cannot find the file specified.”. If you don’t have a 32 bit code editor just launch the script manually from an 32 bit command prompt to see the error.

The solution as demonstrated here is to use as in “%windir%Sysnativewbadmin.exe get disks”. Uncomment that line and put the line with sBackupCommandString = "%windir%system32wbadmin get disks" in comment. Do the same test again and voila. It runs. So there you have it, you can easily test your script now. Just make sure that when the time comes to put it out in the wild you replace it with the real path if the calling process is x64 bit, which for example wscript.exe and cscript.exe are when you launch the form a x64 bit shell (explorer.exe or cmd.exe), which is the default on a x64 operating system. The x86 version runs when you launch them from a x86 shell. But remember the default on x64 bit operating systems is x64 bit and sysnative only functions when called from a 32 bit process (it’s a virtual directory that doesn’t really exists).

Sysnative was introduced in Vista/Windows2008 x64 bit. Not only 32 bit script editor users a affected by this, all 32 bit processes launching tools in "%windir%system32 are. See more on MSDN via this link http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa384187(VS.85).aspx.  For the folks running XP or Windows 2003 x64 bit it is perhaps time you consider upgrading to Windows 2008 R2 or v7 x64 bit? If you can’t, no need to worry, you’re in luck. Microsoft did create a hot fix for you (http://support.microsoft.com/?scid=kb;en-us;942589) that introduces sysnative on those platforms. So welcome to the x64 bit universe, beware of file redirection in WOW64 and happy scripting 🙂

Using Windows 2008 (R2) Backups to Go Virtual Part III

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Part III

Sanitizing the Disk Configuration & Layout


This series describes a physical to virtual migration of a Windows Server 2008 SP2 Standard x64 on a Dell Power Edge one unit rack server with SATA disks (PE750). In fact that was the first production Windows 2008 server ever at that company, they really wanted to use the RTW FTP over SSL functionality. For this exercise we had no use of commercial P2V tools and the original server had to be kept running during the virtualization exercise. The aim was to achieve this with the free / built in tools as much as possible. The hands on approach also provides for an excellent learning opportunity. We have reconstructed our experiences for this article and will discuss the subject for both Windows 2008 and Windows 2008 R2.

 Part I: https://blog.workinghardinit.work/2010/01/27/using-windows-2008-r2-backups-to-go-virtual-2/
Part II:  https://blog.workinghardinit.work/2010/02/01/using-windows-2008-r2-backups-to-go-virtual-ii/

ParrtI:

Breaking the Software Mirror


We don’t need the software mirror anymore for redundancy. On the Hyper-V host the disks are LUNs presented from SAN. The SAN provides the redundancy. So the first thing we do is break up the software mirror. You can use the Disk Management GUI to break the data volume(s). Select the member of the mirror you are not booted from, right click and select break mirror. Confirm that you want to do this at the warning message and you’re done. We opt to break the mirror as this gives us to working copies. This comes in handy in case we mess something up. Removing the mirror is also an option but then you’ll end up with only one copy.

Part III – Figure 1: Breaking the data partition mirror.

Now when you try this on the boot/system volumes this will not work at all. You get the following error: “The specified plex is at the current system or boot plex”.

The solution to this is using diskpart to break the mirror as explained in following KB article: Software mirrored boot volumes in Windows Server 2008 cannot be broken from Disk Manage
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/969749/EN-US I guess somewhere Windows GUI admins where deemed not savvy enough to know what they where doing?

Part III – Figure 2: You have to use Diskpart to break the boot partition mirrors.

Sanitizing Disk configuration and layout


The task at hand is to go from dynamically expanding VHD files to fixed vhd files and shrinking them so they don’t waste so much space. While dynamically expanding vhd’s can be compacted to take up less physical storage, the total capacity of the vhd disk itself does not change.

One option would be to convert them but then the issue with the available tools Hyper-v from Microsoft is that they become 1TB fixed vhd’s. We would then still need to shrink them. The Microsoft Hyper-V tools however only allow for extending disks, not shrink them. Another consideration when using the Hyper-V Disk Edit tool to convert to a fixed disk is that you need sufficient disk space to do it. We are dealing with + 1TB disks here and we just could get enough free disk space to do this.

There is a free tool called VhdResizer (http://vmtoolkit.com/files/folders/converters/entry87.aspx, you need to register for the download) that can shrink vhd files. However, it needs free, non-partitioned space to do this. And it cannot handle Windows dynamic disks. This brings us to another major concern and that is that many disk tools can’t handle dynamic disks and only work well with basic disks. To be clear, I’m not talking about dynamically expanding vhd’s here but about dynamic disks in windows. Try working with a vhd (dynamically expanding or fixed) that contains a Windows dynamic disk and you’ll see this error:


Part III – Figure 3: VhdResizer can’t handle Windows dynamic disks.

The Data Partition


Let’s first focus on getting the data from its partition on the boot disk with the operating system to its own disk. That disk has to a fixed vhd disk with a windows basic disk. There are several ways to get there. Not all are fully supported by Microsoft. We list three approached that work.

Copying or Restoring With NTFS Permissions Intact.


Xcopy, robocopy the data from the original data partition or restore the data directly from backup to a newly created fixed vhd of the desired size and which is a windows basic disk in the virtual machine. This method can retain NFTS permissions and is fully supported. Afterwards we can delete the original partition.

Cloning


We could use a disk clone tool that supports dynamic windows disks and clone the partition to a new fixed vhd of the desired size and which is a windows basic disk in the virtual machine. Ghost.exe/Ghost32.exe can do this perfectly. The cloning is supported by Norton in this case. Afterwards we can delete the original partition. Or use Gparted to achieve the same thing al be it a bit more hands on as you’ll see when we start playing with the boot/system disk.

Using VhdResizer/Gparted free tools


Another way which requires also no paid for tool and uses VhdResizer is the following:

Take copy of the vhd from the backup folder that corresponds with the data partition.

Rename it to something sensible if you want.

Add it to the virtual machine.

Start the virtual machine. You’ll see that is a windows basic disk.

You need to create free space on the disk resize the disk with VhdResizer. So shrink the partition to its desired size or a small as you can with Disk Management. This might still leave considerable space (about half of the original partition size) due to unmovable files.

If that’s too much like in this case (we could not shrink the partition in windows beyond 500 GB), gparted live CD comes to the rescue! The disk is already windows basic disk and that is a format this tool can handle. So if you need to shrink more that windows will allow you to do. Turn to gparted live CD. If the disk you’re working with is larger than 127 GB like in this case mount the disk you’ll have to test various versions … for example gparted-live-0.4.1-2.iso can handle this, but the more recent gparted-live-0.4.6-1.iso can’t. Such in live in systems engineering J


Part III – Figure 4: resizing with gparted.


Part III – Figure 5: reading the data


Part III – Figure 6: Copying the data, after this step it’s done! Just exit gparted & shutdown the VM.

Stop the virtual machine

Remove the vhd from the virtual machine

The vhd is a dynamically expanding one but you can convert it to a fixed vhd and resize it (make it smaller in our case) with vhd resizer. This takes a long time and the GUI doesn’t give any decent feedback. Give it time and be patient.


Part III – Figure 7: Using VhdResizer to shrink the vhd and convert it to a fixed one.

Attach the resized, fixed vhd to the virtual machine, start it, make sure it gets the correct drive letter and you’re good to go!

Now VhdResizer.exe is not supported by a vendor, it’s freeware. Gparted Live CD has no warranty but you can get decent information/help on line. Be aware of the fact that between versions (like the example above) certain functionality is sometimes broken. Such is life. The good thing is that Gparted had drivers for keyboard and mouse that work in Hyper-V from the start. A lot of other tools didn’t or don’t. In the end make up your own mind. I have used all methods and tools on several occasions with success.

The Boot/System Disk


Here we want to get rid of the large data partition on the disk. If the above actions where successful we can just delete that partition. We already have the data covered. Now we still want to get to a fixed, decently sized vhd that contains a Windows basic disk. Again we have several options but beware one of them is very risky and not supported by Microsoft. We list three approached that work.

Cloning


Agian we could use a disk clone tool that supports dynamic windows disks and clone the partition to a new fixed vhd of the desired size and which is a windows basic disk in the virtual machine. Ghost.exe/Ghost32.exe can do this perfectly. The cloning is supported by Norton in this case. Since we didn’t provide any details of this above we’ll dig a bit deeper here. Gparted can’t be used directly as it doesn’t handle windows dynamic disks.

Warnings concerning the techniques discussed below:

When you mount the same dynamic disk as a second drive on a virtual server that boots form the original copy of that dynamic drive you’ll get errors in diskpart/disk manager about the second drive being invalid. Trying to manipulate it (bringing it on or off line) makes the system unresponsive and even corrupts that drive. The trick is to mount the bootable dynamic disk (on the dynamically expanding vhd we want to clone) in another virtual OS that boots form a basic disk.

Now that makes you appreciate Windows 2008 R2 where you can just attach a VHD and work with it, right? Or so you would think. Wrong!
THIS DOES NOT WORK WITH WINDOWS DYNAMIC DISKS in a vhd, whether it contains a bootable partition or not. They will also pop up with “Invalid”. WARNING: If you convert it to a basic disk, you’ll lose all data. The good news is that vhdmount from Virtual Server R2 SP1 does the job.

OK now you have been warned lets walk through the cloning process. Create a new fixed VHD file of new required size. Mount both the new and the old vhd file so we can clone them. You can mount these vhd in several ways depending on what you like best or is more suited for your environment.

You can mount the disks in a host using either the native vhd mount capabilities of Windows 2008 R2 if they are NOT Windows dynamic disks (See warnings above). In our case we cannot us this as the original disk is a dynamic disk. If you haven’t got Windows 2008 R2 by using the Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 VHD Mount utility which is a free download? Follow the instructions at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc708295(WS.10).aspx to get vhdmount operational. This does work with dynamic disks! You can also attach them to another virtual machine (Do not use the original one, see warnings above) as extra disks and run ghost/ghost32 in that virtual machine. There are lots of options here; you can figure it out it’s not hard.

I’ll just post the commands for vhdmount I used here:

vhdmount /p /f “E:DisksDynamicallyExpandingDiskWeWantToResize.vhd”

vhdmount /p /f “E:DisksFixedEmpty.vhd”

Note: Mounting the VHD files is possible only if the VHD files are not currently in use by any virtual machine or other program. You should receive a “The Virtual Hard Disk is successfully plugged in as a virtual disk device.” response, followed by a series of “New hardware found” messages.

Initialize the disk to write a MBR to it to avoid possible booting issues you’ll need to fix.

Run GHOST32 utility, which can be found in the directory where you’ve installed Symantec Ghost. Using the GHOST32 utility, you can “resize while copy” any of the local drives (Local → Disk → To Disk) including virtual ones now mounted. Make sure you choose the destination disk drive that represents the new VHD file, as you can easily overwrite any other local disk drive. You can always use GDISK32 utility to determine first which one is the new drive if uncertain.

Once transfer is complete you can safely choose not to restart the computer and just exit the GHOST32.

Don’t forget to detach the vhd’s! When using vhdmount use following commands:

vhdmount /u “E:DisksDynamicallyExpandingDiskWeWantToResize.vhd”

vhdmount /u “E:DisksFixedEmpty.vhd”

Hxd Hex Editor


This is risky business but worth a try just to give us an option with a free tool. We can convert the dynamic disk to a basic disk with Hxd editor http://mh-nexus.de/en/hxd/. This is totally unsupported but I’ve had great success with it. It doesn’t work for all conversions under all conditions but it’s worth a shot. Make sure to make a backup copy of your virtual machine before truing this! It’s the only way I know to convert a dynamic disk to a basic disk without a commercial tool like Ghost that is one of the few that supports dynamic disks. You can find a good write up of how to use Hxd to convert a dynamic disk to a basic disk here: http://strangelyperfect.tv/6415/how-to-convert-a-dynamic-disk-to-basic-disk-in-windows-7/ & here http://www.dynamic-disk.com/convert-dynamic-disk-to-basic.html

I’ll just report what I did here.

Install the tool in the virtual machine, launch it and select the disk you want to edit. In our case it’s disk 1. In the partition table live in the area between the two arrows. Every 42 you see starting at 1C0 up to must be changed into 07. You have to them all (one for all primary partitions the disk sees) or you’ll mess up the disk.


Part III – Figure 8: The select disk to edit. Note the 42 values in the partition table.


Part III Figure 9: Warning when you save the changes to disk in Hxd.

Save your changes to the disk, these are the values marked in red. Acknowledge the warning, close Hxd and restart your virtual machine. When the servers reboots successfully you can have a look in Disk Management. Sometimes you’ll have to do some disk cleaning afterwards as in the figure below, but the important thing is that the dynamic disk has become a basic disk. Just delete the volumes on the dynamic disk that’s reported as missing and that’s it.


Part III Figure 10: Clean up the dynamic disk that is now reported as missing because it was converted to a basic disk.

Again, I haven’t always been able to get this tool to work in every situation. But it’s worth a try on a COPY of your virtual machine if you have no other options.

You can optimize your disk partition size if you want using Windows Disk Management or Gparted. And finally we can delete the data partition and follow the same methods we described to create data partition to resize the disk to the desired size, using VhdResizer … or not?

Nope no such luck! When I tried to use VhdResizer.exe we got that error again “Invalid VHD file. Please select another”. Now what? Well cloning the disk to a squeaky clean fixed vhd directly and after that see if VhdResizer.exe can handle it. Of cause if you have a disk cloning tool that can handle cloning from a larger disk to a smaller disk you do no not need + 1TB in space and you can simply skip the process of having to reduce its size with VhdResizer.exe. Ghost can handle this but is a paying tool. Gparted is also very handy in achieving this, but more hands on. I tried both. Ghost worked well and without issues. I used ghost/ghost32.exe (11.5). Again we can boot into a virtual machine to do the cloning or mount the vhd’s using VhdMount.exe or directly in the Disk Management GUI (W2K8R2 only) since the disk is already a basic disk! Now to prevent any issues, the ones we warned about above, during the cloning we like to mount the source disk and the target disk in an operating system that is another (not just a copied virtual machine) than the original. That will save you a lot of head ache.

But we really wanted to succeed trying this with a free tool so we took to Gparted once more with the source (dynamically expanding vhd) and target disk (fixed vhd) mounted in a virtual machine.We succeeded to clone the partitions one by one to a new fixed vhd disk. We also marked the correct partition as bootable as judged form looking at the original. But booting from that new disk failed with error 0xc000000e, the boot selection failed because a required device is inaccessible. After rebooting into the Windows 2008 (R2) DVD and opting to repair an existing Windows 2008 installation that it found (0 MB!) I launched the command prompt and ran following commands from there:

bootrec /fixmbr

bootrec /fixboot

boorrec /rebuildbcd


Part III Figure 11: Fixing 0xc000000e the boot selection failed because a required device is inaccessible

For more information see “How to use the Bootrec.exe tool in the Windows Recovery Environment to troubleshoot and repair startup issues in Windows” http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927392.

So than I restarted to try and boot from disk, I was told it needed to run chkdsk which is normal when you used Gparted. After chkdsk ran it booted into the operating system from a fully functional fixed vhd disk that was resized to the correct dimensions. It was even accepted by VhdResizer.exe again as a valid vhd file when I checked.

In the end all was well. Now for the record, this was a demonstration of what we did in one case. It worked for us. The virtualized server is running happily on a live migration Hyper-V cluster as you this is published. Not bad J Just don’t expect Microsoft to support you if you have issues, you’re on your own when you venture into this area. Search and find your own creative solutions, you’re working on VM’s so don’t worry, take copies and you have a lot of changes to try again and again …

The Final Result achieved in production


As a reminder: this is where we came from on the production physical server.

Part III Figure 12: The disk configuration on the original physical machine (W2K8). The bad quality is due to it being taken over a KVM over IP session.

And here we have our final result. This is the layout of our production virtualized server.

Part III Figure 13: Success, the desired disk configuration in the achieved production virtual machine (W2K8).

So we have what we set out to achieve , a virtual machine running on Hyper-V, with 40 GB system drive on a basic disk in a fixed VHD and a 150 GB data drive on a basic disk in a fixed VHD. We succeeded in separating the C: and the D: partitions to their own disk (vhd). The C: and D: disks were also converted from dynamic disks to basic disks. They were also shrunk to a more acceptable size. Finally we converted the disks from dynamically expanding vhd disks to a fixed vhd disks. Mission accomplished.

Conclusions


Some understanding and hands on experience with Windows 2008 (R2) Backup and Complete PC Restore are very valuable to have. Learn this in labs and during testing. Make sure you don’t have to your first restore for real on a critical server.

There is so much to try and experiment with regarding the disk conversions and resizing that it’s almost impossible to discuss them all here. Every situation is different & what I did here might not work for you. So be careful. The good thing is that, once you have virtualized your server, you have the ability to make copies and backups very easily so you can afford to experiment. I suggest you do exactly that and learn from the experience. We all have situations, environments where things are not ideal and where we need to use our creativity to achieve the desired outcome. Whether all of this is worth the time and a good idea in a particular situation is not for me to decide. I’ll just try and get the job done when needed. Advice and consultancy on how to prevent issues, how all their stuff should be in the cloud and such is all very well but people tend to get annoyed with that when they are bleeding from open wounds. So fix their wounds first. And that’s what we did here. Their entire old SATA disk based 1U rack server infrastructure has been virtualized or replaced and is now running happily on a high available Hyper-V cluster.

Well, that’s it. I hope you find some useful tips, pointers and inspiration for both Windows 2008 (R2) Backup and P2V migrations in these notes. The build in tools are good and work well. But you do need to learn about their abilities and limitations. They are free, support and you don’t need agents to backup/restore. Are they the best fit in any situation? No. Are they sometimes the best value for money? Absolutely!

Using Windows 2008 (R2) Backups to Go Virtual II

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Part II

Restoring the Backup – P2V

This series describes a physical to virtual migration of a Windows Server 2008 SP2 Standard x64 on a Dell Power Edge one unit rack server with SATA disks (PE750). In fact that was the first production Windows 2008 server ever at that company, they really wanted to use the RTW FTP over SSL functionality. For this exercise we had no use of commercial P2V tools and the original server had to be kept running during the virtualization exercise. The aim was to achieve this with the free / built in tools as much as possible. The hands on approach also provides for an excellent learning opportunity. We have reconstructed our experiences for this article and will discuss the subject for both Windows 2008 and Windows 2008 R2.

Part I: https://blog.workinghardinit.work/2010/01/27/using-windows-2008-r2-backups-to-go-virtual-2/
Parrt III: https://blog.workinghardinit.work/2010/02/02/using-windows-2008-r2-backups-to-go-virtual-part-iii/

This will probably be the most “boring and redundant” part of the series. A very good post about this process for Windows Server 2008 can be found on the internet @ http://blogs.technet.com/askcore/archive/2009/02/04/windows-server-backup-2008-restore-from-network-location.aspx. They also discuss the command line (wbadmin.exe) way of doing it. So check it out if you need to do that. I did a restore of a Windows Server 2008 R2 machine for this demonstration for completeness. You’ll see that some of the redundant messages during a restore have been fixed and the work flow has been stream lined.

If you did the preparations for the virtual machine mentioned in Part I correctly this part will hopefully be an uneventful activity. Apart from the fact that you do a bare metal recovery from the backup of a physical server to a virtual server which is pretty cool, the result of this restore is the virtualized server with mirrored dynamic disks we’ll have some fun with in Part III. But in the end Part II is a GUI walk through the restore process for illustration purposes as this series is part of a workshop/documentation paper on Windows 2008 (R2) backup and restore for internal/personal use.

Walk Through

We boot the virtual machine we prepared in part I from the Windows 2008 R2 DVD ISO image that we the mounted via the setting for our virtual machine in Hyper-V.

We choose the desired language/keyboard settings and click “Next”.

We’re not going to install Windows but do a restore so we need to select “Repair your computer”.

We’re using a blank virtual machine, so the fact we do not see any installed operating system is no reason, to worry. Select to “Restore your computer using a system image that you created earlier.” and click Next.

At the “Select a system image backup” Click “Next” and your system will be scanned for system image disks

You will get a warning that “A valid backup location could not be found”. Just ignore this and click “Cancel”. It’s perfectly OK.

No latest available and automatically found images appear. This is logical as “a valid backup location could not be found (we have our backups done to a network share) and this is bare metal recovery. It would be spooky if something was found. Select “Restore a different backup” and click “Next”.

Click Advanced. You do not need to install a network driver if you prepared the virtual machine with a legacy network adapter, that driver is included in the Windows Server 2008/R2 DVD so that it just works. The synthetic driver is not included in Windows Server 2008 DVD but it is in Windows Server 2008 R2 DVD.

It will ask “Are you sure you want to connect to the network”, which is what we want and then specify the path of your backup. Remember the remarks if you do not have name resolution you can use the IP address. Also make share you have the credentials needed to access the share, you really need those.

Fill out the UNC path to where you store your backups. That is the path that points to the root where the “WindowsImageBackup” folder resides.

When asked for credentials please provide ‘m.

Select the backup listed and then click “Next”.

Select the desired system image and then click “Next”.

You are presented with the restore options.

We don’t want to exclude disks, we don’t need to install drivers and the default setting under the Advanced button work fine for us, as we need to restart the computer to finish the restore and there is nothing else left to do. Checking for and updating error information is a good thing.

Click Finish to confirm the settings. As we selected “Format and repartition disks” they need you to confirm that this is what you really want. Click “Yes” to start the restore.

You then see a number of dialogs reporting the progress of the restore operation.

The virtual machine restarts and boots into the restored operating system. After verifying all is well with the restored server, making sure we have the integration tools up and running we have accomplished our physical to virtual migration.

The final thing to do is open up a Command Prompt Windows (run as administrator), enter set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1 and then start devmgmt.msc from that same command prompt window. After selecting show hidden devices on the Device Manager View menu you can now see devices that are no longer present in the system, we’ll find our missing hardware NIC’s and delete them. That way we can assign the configuration to the new NIC. See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/241257 for more information. It’s about Windows 2000 but it still applies. That’s it. In the next part (Part III) we’ll deal with the disk sanitization & reconfiguration.

Using Windows 2008 (R2) Backups to Go Virtual

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Part I

The Challenge

This series describes a physical to virtual migration of a Windows Server 2008 SP2 Standard x64 on a Dell Power Edge one unit rack server with SATA disks (PE750). In fact that was the first production Windows 2008 server ever at that company, they really wanted to use the RTW FTP over SSL functionality. For this exercise we had no use of commercial P2V tools and the original server had to be kept running during the virtualization exercise. The aim was to achieve this with the free / built in tools as much as possible. The hands on approach also provides for an excellent learning opportunity. We have reconstructed our experiences for this article and will discuss the subject for both Windows 2008 and Windows 2008 R2.

Physical Machine

Disk Layout

The physical server has no raid controller. For redundancy reasons dynamic disks are used for software mirroring. The original 160 GB SATA disks were going to run out of space "very soon" during its lifespan they claimed, so they were swapped out for bigger ones. This was done one by one, with mirror rebuilding in between, and as such we "leapfrogged" to two 1TB disks. We then made a bigger data partition by concatenating the disks. That combined with some leading free disk space where OEM partition used to be on the original disks resulted in an interesting disk layout. The installation was healthy but the disk layout was not optimal and in fact, the server had way to much disk space. The owners indicated they would need vast amounts of disk space but this proved exaggerated and actual data needs are around 110 GB with some margin for growth. The disk layout is illustrated in below in Figure 1 and shows the disk configuration on the physical machine.

Windows Backup

Backups of this server are made to a file share using a script that automates Windows 2008 Backup (wbadmin.exe). The script does not only backup the server, it also creates backup archives. This is need as Windows 2008 Backup to a UNC path overwrites the last backup. So to keep a couple of weeks/months worth of backups we need to move them out to a save place. The script also collects logs about what’s happening for auditing and mails these to the system administrators indicating success or failure. Since the script also needs to work on Windows Server Core it’s VBScript (it was written late 2007) as .NET support and thus Power Shell is only available in Windows 2008 R2. We will use a backup of the physical machine to restore the server to a virtual machine.

Figure 1: The disk configuration on the physical machine. The bad quality is due to it being taken over a KVM over IP session from the original server!

Goal of the Migration

During the migration we wanted to sanitize the disk layout if possible. The task at hand was to migrate this server to a virtual machine using built in or free tools. Only if we could not find another way we could resort to commercial third party tools but only if we had them available at no extra cost (so a working trial or evaluation version is allowed). We could not use SCVMM 2008 as this server is member of a different domain (in the DMZ). The option of making it a member of our production domain is a no go due to security concerns and installing SCVMM2008 in the DMZ domain was not allowed. The original server also had to be online during the virtualization. We therefore opted to restore the backup of the physical server to a virtual server. During this process our goal was to:

  • resize the disks (no use wasting disk space),
  • separate the system drive from the data drive,
  • convert theWindows dynamic disks to basic disks (no need for dynamic disks and better support with a lot of hard disk tools ),
  • use fixed vhd files for better performance (note: dynamically expanding disks are not that noticeably slower I must say, in low IO situations with little growth. In W2K8R2 the difference is reported to be negligible)

The picture below, Figure 2, illustrates the desired (and achieved) outcome.

Figure 2: The desired disk configuration in a virtual machine.

Preparing a Virtual Machine to Restore the Backup

The entire process described below describes most of the problems you can encounter with restoring Windows 2008 Backups in general. Pay attention to the solutions to these problems and you’ll do just fine. I read a lot of postings on the internet about Windows 2008 backups not working properly but it does. You just need to learn about its limits and abilities. And yes, there are some "quirks" that you need to be aware of. Once you learn this the build in tool will serve you well. I think some of these quirks Microsoft should have documented better and some things are indeed missing functionality (most have been fixed in R2), which is unfortunate but not a show stopper. Remember the definition of engineering: building good working solutions with the means available.

Since we will restore the backup of the physical server to a virtual server, we need to prepare one. We use the Hyper-V to achieve this.

Create the Disks

We start by creating two disks. We need two disks because the original backup was of a server with two physical disks that were members of a software mirror, which also means they were dynamic disks. If you don’t have to disk to restore to you’ll get a cryptic error that the system image restore failed with some error details "Element not found. (0x80070490)". This is the same error you can when the disk layout/boot order is different on the restore machine than the original one. Pay attention to this.

Figure 3: Mind the disk layout and order or you’ll get into trouble.

Windows backup can only restore to disks of the same size or larger (unless you start doing partition restores manually and get handy with BCDEDIT). Since our physical are 1TB and we didn’t have the disk space for such large VHD files we needed to be a bit creative. We came up with the workaround of restoring to dynamic vhd files of 1048 GB (making sure it was indeed a bit larger than the original ones in the backup). The actual size of the data is not higher that 160 GB anyway so the dynamic VHD will not grow beyond that. The restore will see that the disk are large enough and function as planned. We’ll deal with the resizing of the disks, making them basic disks in windows and converting them to fixed vhd after the Servers has been restored to a virtual machine.

Figure 4: The details of the dynamically expanding vhd’s we create to restore the backup to.

Do make sure that you restart the virtual machine once with the new hard disks attach. This is to make sure the disk preparation is 100% finished. IF not a restore might fail with following error: "The system image restore failed." The error details state: "The computer needs to be restarted to finish preparing a hard disk for restore. To continue, restart your computer and run the restore again. (0x80042403)."

Figure 5: Error trying to restore a backup to new not yet prepared disk.

Allocate CPU & Memory

We configure the VM with CPU like the original one. As the original operating system is Windows 2008 x86 we won’t have many issues with virtualization due to the wrong HAL and such … things on that level have definitely become a lot easier and better than they used to be. We allocate enough memory to get the job done on my host.

Networking

We also configure the machine with a temporary legacy NIC. We use a legacy NIC for the restore when we restore a Windows 2008 server because the synthetic NIC aren’t included in the DVD image (you could build one using the WAIK) and we need a functional NIC to get to our backup on the file share. The Windows 2008 R2 image does contain the drivers you need for a synthetic NIC. To make live easy we have a DHCP server had out IP addresses. That saved us the trouble of configuring the TCP/IP settings manually during the restore process. No other NIC’s where configured so the restored VM wouldn’t conflict with the physical one still running in production.

Figure 6: The settings of the prepared VM to which we are going to restore the Windows Backup of the physical machine.

Recapture of Windows Backup in 2008 (R2) Restore Quirks

Mirrored Disks & Disk Layout

When restoring from a software mirrored dynamic disks make sure you have two disks to restore to or you’ll get an error indicating very helpfully that an "element was not found". Pay close attention to the disk layout/ boot order as well, the restore doesn’t allow for variation from the original layout.

Disk Size

Make sure the disks are as large as or larger than the original ones. Another possible other work around is using wbadmin and restoring each partition individually to where you want it and manually editing the disk with BCDEDIT to get it to boot properly would also work it’s a bit tedious and we would still need to shrink the data partition.

Wrong path to backups

Make sure you specify the correct path to restore from \MyServerMyBackupShare where it will than find the WindowsImageBackup folder by itself with the backup(s) of one or more servers in there. You can even copy backups from other locations to that folder; they will be found and listed.

Hyper-V Legacy NIC required for UNC path restores

Make sure your virtual machine in Hyper-V has a legacy nic when restoring a Windows 2008 server or the restore from the unc path will fail because network connectivity can’t be established otherwise and you’ll receive this error: "An internal error occurred. The following information might help you resolve the error: The network path was not found. (0x80070035)". See Figure 7.

Figure 7: Use a NIC that the Windows DVD has drivers for.

This is due to the fact that there are no synthetic NIC drivers in Windows 2008 DVD image. They are available in the Windows 2008 R2 DVDV image however.

I hope you realize you’ll need the correct share/NTFS permissions for the account you’ll use to access the backup share!

So we’re all set. In the next part we’ll discuss the actual restore.