Endpoint to Esxi

[belrpr]

Hi,

Anyone know how to go from an endpoint back-up to a vm on vsphere?
I've tried this:
http://www.insidetechnologies.eu/en/blo ... l-machine/

which works in a sence. It creates a vhd disk which I add to a new vm but the vm starts but crashes with a stop 0x0000007B in Windows 7.
The stop error is about the sata/sas controller.

I can add the disk to a working windows 7 machine.
But in case of a crash of the pysical server I want to add the recovered server as a vm to my new virtual infrastructure.

Any tips / links are much appreciated!

[Mike Resseler]

Tom,

Please export it to a VMDK and not to a VHDX or VHD. The problem is that we are NOT a conversion tool. In this case, I assume that one of the drivers you are using on the physical device that bluescreens.

What you can do after you have converted it to VMDK, you can boot it into safe mode, uninstall the specific drivers and boot again

Let us know

Mike

[belrpr]

Was a writing error.
I've used the vmdk.

Couldn't get into windows. Safe mode bluescreened also.

[Mike Resseler]

Tom,

As I said, this is not a conversion tool. And while we know it works on regular basis, this is one of these drivers that need to be removed BEFORE you can boot it. So you have a problem there... To be honest, I am not aware of a method to dive into that VMDK and offline remove drivers... If somebody has, I'm happy to hear that!

Thanks

Mike

[Gostev]

Best way to do a conversion is to use Bare Metal Restore within the VM, this will work just fine.

[Crompton]

I apologise for butting in, but I agree with Gostev. Do a bare metal restore to a VM. When I did the first test I was amazed at how easy and fast the process was.

We were using Backup Exec 2010 SP3 to backup our Veeam B&R physical server [Win2008R2 on HP DL380 G5] to LTO5 tape. We are using Veeam Endpoint Protection to backup a few Win7 workstations to a NAS. Installed VEP on the B&R server and performed daily backups for a week. Note: Only C: & D: volumes included in the backup since E: volume contains the Veeam B&R Repository and the VMs on that are now backed up to tape with Veeam, besides not having enough storage on the NAS.

For the test restore, created a VM with two virtual disks marginally larger than the physical drives. Only had to add a virtual NIC connected to the LAN. Powered up the VM with VEP bootup ISO, selected bare metal recovery, linked to the backup files on the NAS and then started the recovery process. When that had finished, didn't reboot immediately, but connected the virtual NIC to an isolated network since the original physical server still connected to the LAN. When new VM was started, logged on and in the Device Manager watched old HP devices disappear. Rebooted and then installed VMTools and then VMXNET3 NIC. All the HP Utilities and Applications were still installed, but not functional. Took half an hour to uninstall these which was about the same as restoring the VEP backup. Didn't have to remove the HP utilities, but now they weren't needed on the VM.

All in all I was very surprised at how easy the conversion process was. It's been a few years now since I've had to use the VMware Converter, but using the bare metal restore seemed to be as good or better.

[Dima P.]

P.S. It’s not a ‘true P2V’ but there is an option to convert a disk from endpoint backup to vhd/vhdx/ vmdk via Convert disk option in the VBR – worth checking.