Hyper-V Amigos Showcast Episode 20 and 21

Introduction

This is just a quick blog post to let you know the Hyper-V Amigos have released 2 webcasts recently. These are Hyper-V Amigos Showcast Episode 20 and 21. You will find a link to the videos and a description of the content below.

Hyper-V Amigos Showcast – Episode 20

In episode 20 of the Hyper-V Amigo ShowCast, we continue our journey in the different ways in which we can use storage spaces in backup targets. In our previous “Hyper-V Amigos ShowCast (Episode 19)– Windows Server 2019 as Veeam Backup Target Part I” we looked at stand-alone or member servers with Storage Spaces. With both direct-attached storage and SMB files shares as backup targets. We also played with Multi Resilient Volumes.

For this webcast, we have one 2 node S2D cluster set up for the Hyper-V workload (Azure Stack HCI). On a second 2 node S2D cluster, we host 2 SOFS file shares. Each on their own CSV LUN. SOFS on S2D is supported for backups and archival workloads. And as it is SMB3 and we have RDMA capable NICs we can leverage RDMA (RoCE, Mellanox ConnectX-5) to benefit from CPU offloading and superb throughput at ultra-low latency.

Hyper-V Amigos Show Cast Episode 20

Some extra information

The General Purpose File Server (GPFS role) is not supported on S2D for now. You can use GPFS with shared storage and in combination with continuous availability. This performs well as a high available backup target as well. The benefit here is that this is cost-effective (Windows Server Standard licenses will do) and you get to use the shared storage of your choice. But in this show cast, we focus on the S2D scenario and we didn’t build a non-supported scenario.

You would normally expect to notice the performance impact of continuous availability when you compare the speeds with the previous episode where we used a non-high available file share (no continuous availability possible). But we have better storage in the lab for this test, the source system is usually the bottleneck and as such our results were pretty awesome.

The lab has 4 Tarox server nodes with a mix of Intel Optane DC Memory (Persistent Memory or Storage Class Memory), Intel NVMe and Intel SSD disks. For the networking, we leverage Mellanox ConnectX-5 100Gbps NICs and SN2100 100Gbps switches. Hence we both had a grin on our face just prepping this lab.

As a side note, the performance impact of continuous availability and write-through is expected. I have written about it before here. The reason why you might contemplate to use it. Next to a requirement for high availability, is due to the small but realistic data corruption risk you have with not continuously available SMB shares. The reason is that they do not provide write-through for guaranteed data persistence.

We also demonstrate the “Instant Recovery” capability of Veeam to make workloads available fast and point out the benefits.

Hyper-V Amigos Showcast – Episode 21

In episode 21 we are diving into leveraging the Veeam Agent for Windows integrated with Veeam Backup & Replication (v10 RC1)  to protect our physical S2D nodes. For shops that don’t have an automated cluster node build processes set up or rely on external help to come in and do it this can be a huge time saver.

We walk through the entire process and end up doing a bare metal recovery of one of the S2D nodes. The steps include:

  • Setting up an Active Directory protection group for our S2D cluster.
  • Creating a backup job for a Windows Server, where we select failover cluster as type (Which has only the “Managed by Backup Server”  as the mode).
  • We run a backup
  • After that, we create the Veeam Agent Recovery Media (the most finicky part)
  • Finally, we restore one of the S2D hosts completely using the bare metal recovery option

Some more information

Now we had some issues in the lab one of them suffering to a BSOD on the laptop used to make the recording and being a bit too impatient when booting from the ISO over a BMC virtual CD/DVD. Hence we had to glue some parts together and fast forward through the boring bits. We do appreciate that watching a system bot for 10 minutes doesn’t make for good infotainment. Other than that, it went fine and we were able to demonstrate the process from the beginning to the end.

As is the case with any process you should test and experiment to make sure you are familiar with the process. That makes it all a little easier and hurt a little less when the day comes you have to do it for real.

We hope the show cast helps you look into some of the capabilities and options you have with Veeam in regards to protecting any workloads. Long gone are the days that Veeam was only about protecting virtual Machines. Veeam is about protecting data where ever it lives. In VMs, physical servers, workstations, PCs, laptop, on-prem, in the cloud and Office 365. On top of that, you can restore it where ever you want to avoid lock-in and costly migration projects and tools. Check it out.

Conclusion

We will be doing more web casts on Veeam Backup & Replication v10 in 2020 as it will be generally available in Q1 as far I can guess.

Hyper-V Amigos Showcast Episode 20 and 21

But with Hyper-V Amigos Showcast Episode 20 and 21, that’s it for 2019. Enjoy the holidays during this festive season. The Hyper-V Amigos wish you a Merry X-Mas and a very happy New Year in 2020!

The lure of having a Ransomware Fund

Introduction

What is the the lure of having a ransomware fund all about? It’s the idea that just paying is the best way to deal with a ransomware incident.While preventing as many ransomware attacks as possible is great, it is not something that will be 100% effective. Detecting an incident as early as possible is key to minimizing the effects. This even in the event of successful and early detection some data has been compromised (encrypted). The nature and function of that data will determine the blast radius and the fall out. To recover from that the attack needs to be stopped by finding and eliminating the points of infection.Next to that, the proven ability to restore data and do so fast is a key capability when it comes to recovering form a ransomware attack. If you don’t you’ll either need to eat the loss or try to pay up.

Dealing with Ransomware step by step

  • Prevention is not 100% effective. Don’t bank on it.
  • Early detection
  • Swift & adequate response
  • Quarantine, wipe (nuke from orbit) of contaminated systems & data
  • See if a free decryption solution is available via the security community or your police services cyber crime department
  • Restore your data. You must have multiple options. You must have implemented the 3-2-1 rule. But beware, your off site, air gapped copy cannot be too old. You need to have fairly recent backups in there to have a decent RPO that is meaningful to the business.
  • Bring data, systems and services back into production.

Now make sure you can do this for end user files, server data (images, VMs, Databases, configuration files,  backups) regardless of where it is (on-premises, private, hybrid & public cloud) what delivery model it comes in (Physical, virtual, IAAS, PAAS, SAAS, Serverless).

The lure of having a Ransomware Fund (Isn’t it cheaper to pay?)

Now some bean counter might come up with the idea that paying is cheaper (and easier) than prevention, let alone backup & restore capabilities.

The lure of having a Ransomware Fund

Some would even consider it a “cost of doing business”. This is the the lure of having a ransomware Fund. Ouch, well I know many parts of the world are a lot less save than mine but this is a path down a slippery slope so dangerous you will fall down sooner or later. Let’s look at why that is.

petya ransomware

The lure of having a Ransomware Fund

First, let’s not forget about the down time caused no matter how you resolve it. So prevention and early detection are key. You might not even survive if you pay and get your data back.

Secondly, while I love the idea of prevention and early detection this doesn’t mean that you can get rid of your backup and restore capabilities. Prevention is an mitigation strategy, it doesn’t eradicate the issue. Early detection minimizes the immediate and secondary damage in many cases. But not in all cases and it is also not perfect.

Third, when you pay your ransom how sure are you you’ll get your decryption key and be able to access your data? Well it seems only in 50% of the cases. Now, some ransomware “businesses’’ have a better customer service than many commercial companies and governments. But that doesn’t mean all of them do and by definition they are not honest people. Unless you consider ransomware “Encryption As A Service” that helps you with GDPR. I think not. You might think that a smart ransomware player delivers not to ruin future revenue streams by acquiring a bad reputation. Probably true, but they to can make mistakes, you can make mistakes, you can become road kill of vandals or of criminals who desire or are hired to incur havoc on a certain industry.

Finally, you might end up being a repeat victim as you have shown the willingness & ability to pay. Don’t forget that ransomware is not like mobster protection money. It will not protect you from others or the same ones doing it again.

Conclusion

Banking on having an emergency stash of Bitcoin (ransomware fund) just to pay ransomware isn’t your best option. It might be a last resort faced with the alternative of bankruptcy but even then it remains a costly and risky gamble.

I know that for some people in IT, backups seem outdated and from a gone by era, a solution to a problem form yesterday. I kid you not. Well, I advise you to think again and act upon what you concluded.

 

It’s not as simple as renaming the avhdx to vhdx

This arrives in via the feedback option on my blog

Hi. I see through your website that you are an expert in vhdx / avhdx file. I had a system crash with data loss. I think this data is in an avhdx file. When I rename this file in vhdx, I can mount it but I have an error: the file is corrupted. Do you know a procedure to repair this type of file? I thank you in advance for your support!

Oh dear! An expert? While flattery can get you a long way in life with certain people virtual disks are impervious to that sort of thing. Look, MVP, Veeam Vanguard, Dell Rockstar … tip of the spear, edge of the sword, it’s all fine and well but it’s no good to split a granite piece of rock and virtual disks don’t care about titles, jut about how they are designed to work.

Before we dive into some more details please use the comments sections under the relevant blog post to ask questions. That way everyone can benefit form the answer. It’s all quite anonymous if you want it to be. Secondly vendors like Microsoft have great public support forums with many thousand pairs of eyes reading. That might also work better and faster for your needs.

Some details

When you have avhdx your data is stored in the avhdx and in the parent disks (more avhdx but at least always one vhdx). While you can throw away what’s in a avhdx under certain conditions (and lose that data) and mount the vhdx you cannot throw away the vhdx and hope to be able to access the data in the avhdx you rename to vhdx.

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For a case of real data corruption, not just phantom or mixed up VHDX/AVHDX chain, where you can try to intervene, even manually if needed – and if you have the skills – you’ll have to recover or restore data.

If the storage on which the vhdx/avhdx reside is corrupted a good but time-consuming run of chksdk /f /r can do the job. I have done that before with success. But there are no guarantees in this game.

Other than that, or when the storage is gone, it is restore time. This can be leveraging whatever backup solution you use or VSS snapshots on the storage side of things. Those options are your best bet. You can find some more info on manually manipulating vhdx/avhdx files here but that’s not what you’re facing here it seems.

If you don’t have recovery options in place, what can I say?

Stop what you’re doing and contact a good data recovery company. Only damage can come from trying if you don’t know what you’re doing. You can hope trial and error will fix it but that would be the triumph of hope over experience. You’re usually not that lucky. Trust me.

The snarky bit

I’ll fight like hell if I’m in a pickle and the data is valuable. But it’s near to impossible to do it for someone else as it’s hard, time consuming and often it’s a case were the files have been worked on before, so they tend to be messed up. If the data is not that valuable, just eat the loss.

In reality my time always seems less valuable then peoples their data . Now if you say you can help me retire early by trying anyway and are OK with a best effort, no guarantees given deal I might do it. But I’m pretty sure investing in backups and restores is way cheaper and will lead to better results. Your data is important and valuable, even when my time is not. Just saying

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

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!