SBS 2011 physical to virtual
Hey guys
This one has me stumped. I read the articles on Experts Exchange on how to use Microsoft's disk2vhd software to convert the server to a virtual machine. That's the easy part, but here is where I am having issues.
Physical server has the following hard drive characteristics.
RAID 10 on hd0-hd3. The drive is then split into two volumes. C and D and of course there is the small volume that is the boot volume.
Now, unfortunately if I choose all three volumes they are too big to be the one single VHD (just over 350 gigs) but if I choose C and the boot volume together, and then convert D then the server will boot up but the D drive will be seen as unreadable. When I try and click on it in Explorer it says I need to format the drive. yes, I applied all the Hyper-V drivers by inserting the disk in Hyper-V Actions.
Now I haven't tried to convert the whole thing together because of the size issue and I am assuming that when the disk2vhd runs it will take everything I checked and make it one big VHD correct?
Any help I can get would be much appreciated.
This one has me stumped. I read the articles on Experts Exchange on how to use Microsoft's disk2vhd software to convert the server to a virtual machine. That's the easy part, but here is where I am having issues.
Physical server has the following hard drive characteristics.
RAID 10 on hd0-hd3. The drive is then split into two volumes. C and D and of course there is the small volume that is the boot volume.
Now, unfortunately if I choose all three volumes they are too big to be the one single VHD (just over 350 gigs) but if I choose C and the boot volume together, and then convert D then the server will boot up but the D drive will be seen as unreadable. When I try and click on it in Explorer it says I need to format the drive. yes, I applied all the Hyper-V drivers by inserting the disk in Hyper-V Actions.
Now I haven't tried to convert the whole thing together because of the size issue and I am assuming that when the disk2vhd runs it will take everything I checked and make it one big VHD correct?
Any help I can get would be much appreciated.
David Johnson, CD
VHD max size is 2TB.. if disk2vhd if run to save D: and then D: comes up in a virtual machine as being RAW then there is a problem with the VHD, run disk2vhd again. Disk2VHD doesn't care about the physical layout /RAID as it uses normal windows disk commands.
Convert it to vhdx.
VHDX limit is 64TB
VHDX limit is 64TB
Can't you simply move the data from D: to a virtual drive by copy/paste? If you convert the system to a VHDx and it gets bigger than 2TB then the system will fail to start. Because in this case you would need UEFI configured VM and the system which supports it.
In you case I would convert the system partitions and then create a new VHD - mount it in SBS2011 and copy the data to it. Then attach the VHD back to VM.
In you case I would convert the system partitions and then create a new VHD - mount it in SBS2011 and copy the data to it. Then attach the VHD back to VM.
ASKER
I had been told that when converting that the boot partition has to be less than 127 gigs because it has to go on as an IDE drive. I will try and convert it to VHDX tonight and push it to the Hyper-V server and see if that works. I will create a vhdx from the C, D and the boot partition because those are all on the RAID 10 drive. I just don't know if SBS 2011 will boot off a VHDX volume or not.
Leas than 127GB? Thats strange, Hyper-V does not have LBA problem.
ASKER
I will try and find that website that gave me this information. :-)
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ASKER
Thanks. I ran disk2vhd and chose the volumes that are on the same physicalicense disk and did one vhd from that and then I did the remainder volumes and started the system up. Worked great. I just did a test run though but most of the services started good. I think this next time I will stop as many services as I can and do another test run to see if the next one has no problems. :-)
@jonmenefee Did stopping the services help?