Tag Archives: Windows Backup

Windows Server Backup Benefits from Improvements in Windows Server 2012

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Introduction

In certain environments we backup VMs and any remaining physical hosts using Windows Backup. Before you all think this is ridiculous, I advise you to think again. With some automation you can build a very reliable agentless backup solution with the built in functionality. Windows Server 2012 brings good news for the smaller & perhaps low budget environments. Windows Server Backup is now capable of doing host level backups of the Hyper-V guest stored on Clustered Shared Volumes. This was not the case in Windows 2008 R2 and it is a vast improvement.This change is due to the fact that CSV has been changed not to require specialized API capable of dealing with it’s intricacies. All backup products now can backup CSVs without specialized APIs.

This is, linked to huge improvements in how a CSV behaves during a backup. In the past, when you started a backup, the CSV ownership would be moved to the node that runs the backup and all access by other nodes was in redirected mode for the duration of the backup. Unless you used a hardware VSS provider, which were not trouble free either. If your backup software did not understand CSVs and use the CSV APIs you were out of luck. From Windows Server 2012 on you are only in redirected I/O mode for the time it takes to create the VSS snapshot. The rest of the backup duration your nodes access the CDV disk in direct mode. So back to Windows Server Backup. You cannot up the CSV as disk volume but you can select Hyper-V from the items to include in the backup.

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That will show all VMs running on that host, meaning you cannot backup VMs running on another host. Compared to Windows Server 2008 R2 where using the native Windows backups  with VMs on a CSV LUN meant using in guest backups this a major improvement.

Some Approaches to Using Windows Server Backup

Sometime we run the backups to local disk and regularly copy those off to a file share. This has the benefit of providing the backup versioning you can from using a local disk. The draw back is that the backups can be rather big.

In VMs, that is with backups in the guest, we run those backups to a file share over a 1Gbps management network. Performance is good, but it leaves us with the issue that there is no versioning.

For that reason our backup script copies the entire backup folder for a server to an archive folder on that same JBOD. Depending on how much space you have and need you can can configure the retention time of these older backups. This way you can keep a large number of backups over time.  A script runs every day that deletes the older backups based on the chosen retention time so you don’t run out of space.

There is one way around the lack of versioning when writing backups to a share and that is to mount a VHD on a file share locally to the host where you are running a backup or use pass through disk inside the VM. While you can get away with this becomes rather messy due to management & flexibility drawbacks of pass through disks. Mounting a VHD on a file share inside a VM is also a performance issue. So while possible and viable in certain scenarios I don’t use this for more than a few hosts and those are physical ones.

We had hoped that Windows Server 2012 with its support for VSS snapshots on SMB 3.0 shares would have enabled backup versioning in Windows Backup, just like it can do for backups to local disk. Unfortunately this is not the case. You’ll still get the same warning when backing up from a Windows Server 2012 host to an SMB 3.0 share as you used to get with previous versions:

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How fast are backups and restores?

The largest environment is a couple of Physical servers, a two node Hyper-V cluster and about 22 virtual machines. That includes some with a larger amount of data. The biggest being 400 GB. Full backups are run weekly at night on all servers over 1Gbps and this works just fine.

We can backup a VM of with a 50GB VHD (about 50% to 75% in use) and copy that backup to the archive folder in 20 minutes. We backup AND copy to archive a VM’s C: Drive (20GB of data) and a D: Drive (190GB of data), 2 separate VHD  in 2.5 hours.

For some statistics. A bare metal restore of a VM or physical host over 1Gbps with a single VHD or volume with the OS, applications and some data takes us 30 tot 35 minutes in real life due to the overhead of setting a new VM up. I you just want to restore individual data you can do that as well. You can even mount the backup VHD and recover them via the Windows Explorer.

This is what a the logging we do and e-mail to the sys admins looks like:

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Where else do the Windows Server 2012 improvements help?

Data Deduplication

Now there is some good news. We ran ddpeval.exe against the JBOD LUNS where we store these archived backups and got some great results. We also copied such an archive folder to a Windows Server 2012 Host and ran data deduplication against it. In that test we achieved a 84%-85% deduplication rate depending on how many versions of the backups we archive and what the delta is during that time frame.  The latter is important. If we run dedupe only against domain controller backup archives we get up to 94%. Deduplication should not not impact restore performance to much because in 99% of the cases you revert to the last backup which sits in the WindowsBackup Folder. Only if you need older backups you will work against the deduped files, unless the archive folder is on the same LUN as the original backups. I’ don’t have real life info about restores yet. Just a small lab test.

SMB 3.0 & Multichannel

In Windows Server 2012 you also get all benefits of SMB 3.0 and MultiChannel for your backup traffic.

Not your grandfathers ChkDsk

The vastly improved ChkDsk is a comfort for worried minds when it comes to fixing potential corruption on a large LUN. Last but not least, the FLUSH command in NTFS makes using cheaper data disks safer.

VHDX

The VHDX format allows for 64TB. That means your Windows Server backup can now handle more than 2TB LUNs. This should be adequate Smile

Conclusion

With some creativity and automation via scripting you can leverage the Windows Backup to be a nice and flexible solution. Although I feel that providing backup versioning to a file share is an improvement that is missing  the new features help out a lot and all in all, it’s not bad at all! So you see, even smaller organizations can benefits seriously from Windows Server 2012 and get more bang for their bucks.

Reflections on Getting Windows Network Load Balancing To Work (Part 2)

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This is part 2 in series on Windows Network Load Balancing. Part 1 can be found here: https://blog.workinghardinit.work/2010/07/01/reflections-on-getting-windows-network-load-balancing-to-work-part-1/

On Default Gateways, Routing & Forwarding.

Here’s a bullet list of what people tend to trip over when configuring NLB network settings.

  • No support for multiple Default Gateways that are on multiple subnets
  • The default gateway does not have to be empty on the NLB NIC
  • The Private and the NLB NIC can be on separate or the same subnets
  • You can have multiple Default Gateways if they are on the same subnet
  • Don’t forget about static routes where and when needed.
  • Beware of the strong host model in Windows 2008 (R2) for both IPv4 & IPv6 (WK3 it was only for IPv6)
  • Mind the order of the connections in Adapters and Bindings.

Now let’s address the subjects in this list.

No support for multiple Default Gateways that are on multiple subnets

When using IP addresses from different subnets you cannot have a default gateway on every NIC because that will cause routing issues. This is not different for the NIC’s used in Windows NLB. So you can have only one NIC with a Default Gateway and if the other NICs need to route somewhere you need to add static persistent routes. Those routes must be persistent or they will not survive a reboot of the server. In the figure below you see a classic two NIC NLB cluster with the Default Gateway Empty on the NLB NIC. This could be a valid setup for an intranet. You can add routes for the subnet in the company that need to be able to talk to the NLB Cluster and you’re golden. The Private NIC gets a default gateway and acts like any other NIC in your network.

In this example we have the Default Gateway on the Private NICs they can route internally and to the internet. If you need traffic to & from the internet form the NLB NIC you could enable forwarding on the NLB NIC or enable weak host behavior which can be done more atomic than what you achieve by enabling forwarding. If you only need to route internally we could use the same approach of enabling forwarding instead of adding static persistent routes for the NLB NIC. But then you don’t isolate & protect traffic that neatly and it will route to everywhere the default gateway can get.

So we prefer to play with static persistent routes in this case. We’ll briefly look at some examples now. If you only need to route internally (i.e. to reach the database or a client PC) from the NLB NIC we add the needed static persistent routes on the NLB NICs using the route command.

In order for the NLB NICs to reach the database with strong host model and no forwarding enabled:

Route add -p 10.30.0.0 mask 255.255.0.0 10.10.0.1

To reach the client PC’s:

Route add -p 10.20.0.0 mask 255.255.0.0 10.10.0.1

(Using route print you can look at the routes and using route delete you can get rid of them.)

Or by using netsh, (it’s advised to use netsh from Windows 2008 on)

netsh interface ipv4 add route 10.30.0.0/16 “NLB NIC” 10.10.0.1

netsh interface ipv4 add route 10.20.0.0/16 “NLB NIC” 10.10.0.1

(you can look at the routing table by using netsh interface ipv4 show route, with netsh interface ipv4 delete route you get ridd of then, see http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc731521(WS.10).aspx for more information.

You could also connect to the database over the PRIVATE NIC and then you don’t need that route. If you can configure it like that it’s a good solution. But all situations differ.

You can also play with the weakhost / stronghost model behaviour:

netsh interface ipv4 set interface Private NIC weakhostsend=enabled

netsh interface ipv4 set interface Private NIC weakhostreceive=enabled

netsh interface ipv4 set interface NLB NIC weakhostsend=enabled

netsh interface ipv4 set interface NLB NIC weakhostreceive=enabled

Now don’t just blindly enable on every NIC you can find on the server. Test what you really need and use only that. I leave that as an exercise to the readers. It really depends on the situation and needs for your particular situationJ. Keep in mind that when you enable weakhostsend and weakhostreceive on every NIC this reverts your Windows 2008 servers back to Windows 2003 behavior and this might not be needed or wanted. So just enable what you need for optimal security.

Naturally enabling forwarding will do the trick as well, as this creates a weak host model. Depending on how many NICs you use and how traffic must flow you might have to do it on more than one NIC, normally the one(s) without a default gateway.

netsh interface ipv4 set interface “NLB NIC” forwarding=enabled

 

If you want to see the configuration of the NIC you can run:

           netsh interface ipv4 show interface l=verbose

That will produce something like below:

Interface Local Area Connection Parameters

IfLuid                             : ethernet_5
IfIndex                            : 3
State                              : connected
Metric                             : 10
Link MTU                           : 1500 bytes
Reachable Time                     : 21500 ms
Base Reachable Time                : 30000 ms
Retransmission Interval            : 1000 ms
DAD Transmits                      : 3
Site Prefix Length                 : 64
Site Id                            : 1
Forwarding                         : disabled
Advertising                        : disabled
Neighbor Discovery                 : enabled
Neighbor Unreachability Detection  : enabled
Router Discovery                   : dhcp
Managed Address Configuration      : enabled
Other Stateful Configuration       : enabled
Weak Host Sends                    : disabled
Weak Host Receives                 : disabled
Use Automatic Metric               : enabled
Ignore Default Routes              : disabled
Advertised Router Lifetime         : 1800 seconds
Advertise Default Route            : disabled
Current Hop Limit                  : 0
Force ARPND Wake up patterns       : disabled
Directed MAC Wake up patterns      : disabled


The default gateway does not have to be empty on the NLB NIC

It is not a hard requirement to leave the Default Gateway on the NLB NIC empty and put it on the private NIC. You can set it on the NLB NIC and leave the private NIC’s gateway empty instead. An example of this you can see in the demo. This is the best choice in my opinion when you need the NLB NIC to route to destinations you don’t know how to reach, i.e. the internet, so for public websites. The prime function of the default gateway is exactly to help with that. When you don’t know where to send it, send it to the Default Gateway. If you need to reach other internal subnets from the Private NIC, just use static routes. Don’t use the NLB NIC as that is internet facing in this case. You can see an example of this in the figure below. Also in this case you’ll find that you do not have to enable forwarding on the NIC using netsh, as the NIC that has to answer to the unknown IP Address has the Default Gateway. This setup works great for example in a managed domain environment for internet access where the NLB NICs are internet facing and the private NIC is for management, Active Directory, Backups, etc.

In this example we have the Default Gateway on the NLB NICs so it can route internet traffic. Any routes needed in the Private NIC subnet are added as persistent static routes. An example of this is to reach the database server.

As traffic from the Private range is never supposed to go via the NLB Public range and vice versa we do not need to care about forwarding or strong host /weak host models. We can keep traffic nicely separated and that is a good thing. If you build this on Windows 2008(R2) just like you did on Windows 2003 it would work out of the box and you might not even know about a change in default behavior from weak host model to strong host model.

To get the PRIVATE NIC to reach the database server you’d add static routes and be done with it.

Add needed static persistent routes using the route command:

Route add -p 10.20.0.0 mask 255.255.0.0 172.16.2.1

Or by using netsh, (it’s advised to use netsh from Windows 2008 on)

netsh interface ipv4 add route 10.20.0.0/16 “PRIVATE NIC” 172.16.2.1

No requirement to have different subnets for Private and NLB NICs  / Multiple Gateways When the subnets are the same

There is no requirement to have different subnets for every NIC. Sometimes I read that this is a requirement on forums when someone is having issues but it’s not. You can also experiment with multiple Default Gateways if they are on the same subnet (WARNINGS APPPLY*)

So here you can play with giving every NIC a default gateway (same subnet, so no issues), with static persistent routes, with enabling forwarding and weak host / strong host configuration. I tend to use only one gateway and use static persistent routes. If I need to relay I’ll go for weak host minimal configuration or revert to forwarding.

WARNINGS APPLY*: When you start having multiple NIC’s for multiple NLB Clusters on the same NLB nodes, things can get a bit complicated and unpredictable. So I prefer only to use a default gateway on both NICs when you have two NIC , one for private (management) traffic and one for the NLB cluster traffic. Once you have multiple NIC’s for multiple NLB clusters (1 private NIC + 2 or more NLB cluster NICs) you can no longer play this game safely, even if they are all on the same subnet, without running into trouble I have experienced. You can get an event id 18 “NLB cluster [X.X.X.X]: NLB detected duplicate cluster subnets. This may be due to network partitioning, which prevents NLB heartbeats of one or more hosts from reaching the other cluster hosts. Although NLB operations have resumed properly, please investigate the cause of the network partitioning” . Also in this situation you can’t have a default gateway on the management NIC and one on one of the NLB NIC’s without a default gateway on the second NLB NIC. Forget that. You can get issues with a node remaining in “converging” forever and what’s worse the NLB cluster will send traffic to all nodes so 1/x connections will fail. Rebooting one node might help but once you reboot ‘m both you run the risk of this happening and you really don’t want that. Once you dealing with multiple cluster IP addresses on multiple separate NIC’s you’d better stick to one default gateway on one of the NIC’s and nowhere else.  This kind of makes me wonder if it’s pure luck that it works with 2 cluster NICs or not, with multiple and with reboots of the nodes I know we run into trouble and that’s no good.

It’s also smart not to mix static routes with forwarding to achieve the same thing. And please have the exact same configuration on very particular NIC on every node. Not one node with NLB NIC 1 routing via static routes and the other node using forwarding on NLB NIC 1. That’s asking for inconsistent behavior.

We’ll briefly look at some examples now.

If you only need to route internally (i.e to reach the database or a client PC) we add the needed static persistent routes on the NLB NICs using the route command.

In order for the NLB NICs to reach the database with strong host model and no forwarding enabled:

Route add -p 10.30.0.0 mask 255.255.0.0 10.10.0.1

To reach the client PC’s:

Route add -p 10.20.0.0 mask 255.255.0.0 10.10.0.1

(Using route print you can look at the routes and using route delete you can get rid of them.)

Or by using netsh, (it’s advised to use netsh from Windows 2008 on)

netsh interface ipv4 add route 10.30.0.0/16 “NLB NIC” 10.10.0.1

netsh interface ipv4 add route 10.20.0.0/16 “NLB NIC” 10.10.0.1

(you can look at the routing table by using netsh interface ipv4 show route, with netsh interface ipv4 delete route you get ridd of then, see http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc731521(WS.10).aspx for more information.

You can also just enter the default gateway on the NLB NICs as well. All NICs are on the same subnet this will cause no issues. Just remember that traffic will also go to where ever that gateway routes, even to the internet.

We already know we can play with the weakhost / stronghost model:

netsh interface ipv4 set interface Private NIC weakhostsend=enabled

netsh interface ipv4 set interface Private NIC weakhostreceive=enabled

netsh interface ipv4 set interface NLB NIC weakhostsend=enabled

netsh interface ipv4 set interface NLB NIC weakhostreceive=enabled

Again don’t just blindly enable on every NIC you can find on the server. Test what you really need and use only that. I leave that as an exercise to the readers. As I’ve said before, it really depends on the situation and needs for your particular situation. Keep in mind that when you enable weakhostsend and weakhostreceive on every NIC this will just revert your Windows 2008 server into Windows 2003 behavior and this might not be needed or wanted. So just enable what you need for optimal security.

There is a very good explanation of strong and weak host behavior by “The Cable Guy” at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2007.09.cableguy.aspx I strongly advise you to go take a look.

And naturally enabling forwarding will do the trick in this scenario as well, as this creates a weak host model. Depending on how many NICs you use and how traffic must flow you might have to do it on more than one NIC, normally the one(s) without a default gateway.

netsh interface ipv4 set interface “NLB NIC” forwarding=enabled

When & Why Use Three NICs or more?

NLB supports using multiple network adapters to configure separate clusters. This allows for configuring multiple independent clusters on each host. We used to have only virtual clusters meaning that you could configure multiple clusters on a single network adapter. Anyone who ever had to trouble shoot some networking or configuration issues on a production NLB will appreciate the ability to limit interruptions and problems to one cluster instead of 2 or more. As an example of this I had to trouble shoot a CAS/HUB Exchange Implementation two node NLB implementation. The NLB Cluster of the CAS role had this very issue, but since it was running on its own cluster with a separate NIC the HUB role NLB cluster has no issues what so ever. Another good reason to use more NIC is to separate traffic, for example FTP versus HTTP on the same NLB Cluster.

One of the worst things that can happen is that an issue messes up the proper functioning of the NLB itself. That way even if the virtual IP remains available no host or only some of the hosts get network traffic. That means the cluster is unavailable or is only partially responding. This is a bad situation to be in and can be hard to trouble shoot. Since it’s a high availability technology you can bet someone is looking over your shoulder that has a vested interest in getting that resolved as soon as possible.

Mind the order of the connections in Adapters and Bindings

Make sure the PRIVATE NIC that is to be used for private network traffic (DNS, AD, RDP, …) is listed first. That prevent any issues (speed, functionality) of those services and you experience will be much better. This is illustrated in the figures below. LAN-HUB is the PRIVATE NIC here. The others are for NLB (yup it’s an Exchange 2010 setup).

Conclusion & recapitulation

I’ll finish with some closing musings on single & multiple default gateway and getting/sending network traffic where it needs to go.

When you enter a gateway on the second, third and so on NIC next to the one on the first NIC you’ll get a warning:

—————————

Microsoft TCP/IP

—————————

Warning – Multiple default gateways are intended to provide redundancy to a single network (such as an intranet or the Internet). They will not function properly when the gateways are on two separate, disjoint networks (such as one on your intranet and one on the Internet). Do you want to save this configuration?

—————————

Yes No

—————————

This will not work reliable when you have multiple subnets. This is why you use static persistent routing entries. Depending on your needs you can also use forwarding or the weak host model and even combine those with static persistent routes if needed of desired. Now the above also means that if you have multiple NICs with IP addresses on the same subnet you can indeed enter a Default Gateway on all of them.

If you don’t have or cannot have a Default Gateway filled in you are left with two options. If you know what needs to go where you can add static routes, which is basically telling the NIC the IP of a gateway to send traffic to for a certain destination. This is assuming you can reach that IP and that the traffic is not from a source/ to a destination that has no route defined and firewall allow for it, etc.

If you have no route or you can’t specify one (i.e. you can’t predict where traffic will have to go) you have one other option left and that is to route the traffic via the NIC that does have a Default Gateway. This used to work out of the box on Windows 2003 and earlier, but it doesn’t work out of the box since Windows 2008 (R2). That is because by default NICs in Windows 2008(R2) operate in a strong host model. So it will not receive or send traffic destined for some other IP than itself or send traffic originating somewhere else than itself. For that you’ll need to set the NIC properties to weak host send and receive or you need to enable forwarding. Actually forwarding is disabled by default on Windows 2003 as well. The big difference is that Windows 2003 operates in a weak host manner (send/receive) as opposed to Windows 2008 (R2) strong host mode. By enabling forwarding we put the Windows 2008 server in weak host mode and as such it works (see RFC1122). On the internet you’ll find both solutions, but the link between the two is often never made. Using weak host receiving and weak host sending allows for more atomic, custom configurations than forwarding.

Contact me via the web site or leave a comment if you have any questions or suggestions.

Post Script / Side Note because someone asked J

Basically you can have multiple gateways on a server but only one default gateway. You can add more than one default gateway on the same NIC but then they will only be used when the default gateway filled out in is not available, it will then try the next one and so forth. You can add multiple gateways to a single NIC or one or more to multiple NICs but that can, get messy very quickly. Whether it is wise to provide gateway redundancy in such a manner is another discussion. See also KB article http://support.microsoft.com/kb/157025. Be mindful of the extra configurations you’ll need (Dead Gateway Detection). This is a rather uncommon scenario on a windows server. You can use it for redundancy or when you want the traffic to go to a certain default gateway instead of another when it is available (so separate traffic for example for cost or to reduce the traffic load).

And then there’s adding a default gateway that’s on another subnet than the IP address of the NIC. In that case you get this warning:


—————————

Microsoft TCP/IP

—————————

Warning – The default gateway is not on the same network segment (subnet) that is defined by the IP address and subnet mask. Do you want to save this configuration?

—————————

Yes No

—————————

All pretty cool stuff you can do to mess with peoples head and understanding of what’s going on (it can work if the router on the local subnet has a route the subnet where that default gateway lives and PROXY ARP is working … but we’re not going to turn this into a networking course or pretty soon we’ll be installing RRAS and turn the server into a router.

The SP1 Béta Wave – E2K10 & W2K8R2

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News from Tech Ed 2010 North America rolls in and we have the announcements of Windows 2008 R2 SP1 Béta for July 2010. Exchange 2010 SP1 Béta became available today! I’m grabbing it 🙂

I wouldn’t be surprised to see the the final releases of the products be announced at Tech Ed 2010 EMEA. Now I also wouldn’t mind if they came sooner due to the new and improved feature set both service packs offer, but I’m not really counting on that.

Bob Muglia’s live streamed keynote @ Tech Ed 2010 North America is nearing it’s end by now and he’s pretty up beat about lots of subjects Visual Studio 2010, Azure, System Center, Cloud, Exchange, OCS 14, Windows Phone 7, SQL Server 2008 R2, Office 2010, SharePoint 2010, Bing Maps & SDK, Avatar as a cloud case study & collaboration with Microsoft etc.

Cloud is omnipresent but they talk about hybrid. Making sure Hybrid is cost effective is important to me. I don’t need more work and costs but less.

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.