Here is my scenario;
I have server 2008 r2 as my file server, with several attached raw device mappings as our drive letters I map to all the pc's. Recently the file server is giving me fits, as it is constantly locking up and becoming totally unresponsive. I have been fighting it trying to figure out the problem, but thought perhaps it would be easier to just create a new server 2008 r2 vm from one of my templates. Then I could detach the RDM's from the old file server and attach to the new file server. Pretty sure when I attached the RDM's though, the ntfs file permissions would be lost. I am pretty sure there is a way to do this elegantly, but have not been able to find it out just by googling it. Does someone not of a good way to accomplish what I need would like to do?
As a side note, thought I would put the following so someone doesn't suggest it. I do not have enough SAN space to copy the files with robocopy (this is how I did it when moving from the old SAN to the new SAN a year ago). Besides the fact that it would be about the last option I would want to do. I have about 2.5 terabytes worth of data, and do not want to copy that anyway.