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This would be time consuming.<br />
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Please update whether you can spend some amount on procuring new hardware.<br />

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This would be time consuming.

Please update whether you can spend some amount on procuring new hardware.


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It is more for research and eductional purposes. I am trying to see what alternatives exists other than physically duplicating the machine.
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It is more for research and eductional purposes. I am trying to see what alternatives exists other than physically duplicating the machine.

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What mode of licensing (Retail or Volume License) are you using in your Windows Server 2008 physical Servers ?<br />

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What mode of licensing (Retail or Volume License) are you using in your Windows Server 2008 physical Servers ?


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I have development licenses. I have used VMware in the past, but am thinking of using VirtualPC this time since it is more &quot;native&quot;. Any experiences cloning with each?
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I have development licenses. I have used VMware in the past, but am thinking of using VirtualPC this time since it is more "native". Any experiences cloning with each?

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I have a web, database, and domain controller server each running on Windows 2008. I am trying to create an instant redundancy strategy in case any of the servers burns or disappears.<br />
<br />
I thought maybe the best way to do this is to clone each of the servers into a virtual machine and test that it runs. This way I can power it off and it will be ready to take over any time. I would clone the servers nightly so they would have the latest settings. Has anyone done this or recommend a way to do this?
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I have a web, database, and domain controller server each running on Windows 2008. I am trying to create an instant redundancy strategy in case any of the servers burns or disappears.

I thought maybe the best way to do this is to clone each of the servers into a virtual machine and test that it runs. This way I can power it off and it will be ready to take over any time. I would clone the servers nightly so they would have the latest settings. Has anyone done this or recommend a way to do this?

How to clone a server into a working Virtual Machine?

Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2, based on the Microsoft Vista codebase, is the last 32-bit server operating system released by Microsoft. It has a number of versions, including including Foundation, Standard, Enterprise, Datacenter, Web, HPC Server, Itanium and Storage; new features included server core installation and Hyper-V.

Windows Server 2008

VMware, a software company founded in 1998,  was one of the first commercially successful companies to offer x86 virtualization. The storage company EMC purchased VMware in 1994. Dell Technologies acquired EMC in 2016. VMware’s parent company is now Dell Technologies.

VMware has many software products that run on desktops, Microsoft Windows, Linux, and macOS, which allows the virtualizing of the x86 architecture.  Its enterprise software hypervisor for servers, VMware vSphere Hypervisor (ESXi), is a bare-metal hypervisor that runs directly on the server hardware and does not require an additional underlying operating system.

VMware

Microsoft Virtual Server was a virtualization solution that facilitated the creation of virtual machines on the Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows Server 2003 operating systems. Virtual machines are created and managed through a web-based interface that relies on Internet Information Services (IIS) or through a Windows client application tool called VMRCplus. Features included Linux guest operating system support, Virtual Disk Precompactor, symmetric multiprocessing (SMP), x64 host operating system support, the ability to mount virtual hard drives on the host machine and additional operating systems support, including Windows Vista, and a volume shadow copy writer.