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Convert Acronis TIB to XenServer Virtual Machine

Every night we perform full Acronis backups on five our servers. Some of these servers have multiple 500 GB+ disks (RAID 5 SCSI arrays). Periodically, we use VMware Converter to convert the TIB images to VM's in VMware Server 2.0 for a test environment. It's a long process, but it works well. However, now we want to use XenServer to take advantage of more memory (since it's 64-bit). That's where my questions come in.

I was going to try to use "Convert Backup to Virtual Disk" in Acronis to build VMDK's (from what I understand, VHD's have a 127 GB limit, so I can't convert to VHD's). Each disk (C:, D:, etc.) will be converted to a single VMDK file. Then, I was going to use XenConvert 2.0.2 to convert the VMDK's to XenServer, but I can only convert one VMDK at a time. How can I import multiple VMDK's into a single XenServer VM? Is there a more direct way to convert Acronis TIB's to XenServer?

What is the best way to convert Acronis TIB's to XenServer virtual machines?

techhealth

I think XenConvert 2.1 can do multi-volume convert, but I haven't tried it out yet.

ProUAdmin

ASKER

XenConvert doesn't support TIB images. I think what I'm going to try to do is build a blank VM, boot into Acronis and restore the image to the VM using Acronis Universal Restore.

techhealth

That certainly works, but I'm not sure it's much quicker than TIB -> VMDK -> Xen, if you can do multi-VMDK at a time with XenConver2.1. I had past run into problems using Universal Restore to P2V (on VMWare at least), resulting in strange device errors. But newer Acronis might do a better job (haven't used it in 2 yrs).

ProUAdmin

ASKER

I can't find XenConvert 2.1 on Citrix's website.

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

techhealth

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