As a customer of Acronis' super-easy True Image since 2004 to backup my personal laptop, I was pleased to find out they active supported Microsoft MVPs by offering free licenses. I wanted to find out, four years later, what they have to offer for the enterprise/corporate space where managing backups for numerous workstations and servers becomes a massive hassle. What Acronis provided to me were
- True Image Echo Workstation
- True Image Echo Workstation Universal Restore
- True Image Echo Enterprise Server
- True Image Echo Enterprise Server Universal Restore
I have been playing around with them to how to work in a network environment, but I will leave that adventure for a future post; what I am journaling down here is the sequence of steps it took me to convert a physical server into a virtual server. How did I move an entire OS onto a completely different set of underlying hardware? According to Acronis, their Universal Restore provides an easy sequence of activities to restore a backup image. Promising to take care of hardware incompatibility ills and swapping of device drivers, so that the administrator need not worry about it.
Skeptic as I was, I had to try it to see if it really works.
Coincidentally, I was using an old laptop as a test platform to run Windows 2003 and ISA Server 2006, to check out its HTTP routing capabilities. And also coincidentally, my new Dell PowerEdge T300 server had arrived; my intention for this server all along was to load up Windows 2008 with Hyper-V to host many more experimental/development machines. I felt this was the prime candidate for the virtualization-consolidation scenario.
List of tasks before initiating a restoration:
- Backup the original laptop disk (20GB partition)
- Burn an Acronis Rescue Media boot CD, with Universal Restore
- Set up a new guest in Hyper-V
- By default, Hyper-V includes the new Virtual Machine Bus Network Adapter for guest machines. Acronis loader OS in the boot media cannot make use of this adapter. Add a Legacy Network Adapter so that Acronis loader OS can make network connections.
- Create a virtual disk of 40GB, and pre-create a 40GB partition within it. This is to allow Acronis True Image Echo to "auto-expand" the restoration of a 20GB partition to a bigger partition. If this is not done, it would only restore the 20GB partition and not make full use of the new disk.
- Slot the Acronis Rescue Media CD into the drive, and attach it to the guest machine's virtual optical drive.
- Turn on the guest.
NOTE: these screen shots do not illustrate all the dialog boxes and interface that occur during the restoration process. I only included those that require some commentary.
If everything at boot-up loaded correctly, the Acronis loader OS will launch the Acronis Rescue Media interface as above. I naturally picked Acronis True Image Echo Enterprise Server with Acronis Universal Restore (Full version).
The necessary files and drivers related to that option will be further loaded. As seen, this boot media is only loaded with Enterprise Server edition; the Workstation edition would be a separate CD burnt from, not surprisingly, the Workstation edition.
Once True Image Echo (with Universal Restore) loaded up, it was time to go into Recovery mode.
Since the backup image was located on another Windows system, I connected to it via regular Windows network share mechanism.
Once the image file is located, I get to pick with items within in the image (partition, MBR) I wish to restore. I choose only the primary (20GB) partition (not illustrated here).
Next I have to indicate where on the destination disk I wish to dump this backup partition. I chose to apply it on top of the 40GB partition I created. Again, I stress that at this stage of time, Acronis True Image Echo does not offer the feature of auto-expanding a backup partition onto a raw blank disk. So a pre-formatted partition is the most convenient way to upsize the old disk.
By default, using a Windows OS installer to pre-partition a disk would leave an unallocated 8MB slot to allow Windows for future expansion with Dynamic disks. True Image Echo would notice that, and ask how allocate the partition. Leave it as it is.
Obviously, restoring onto a completely new hardware platform requries me to use Acronis Universal Restore.
At this specific stage of time, there were no further drivers to be provided.
The final checklist prior to Proceeding with the actual restoration process.
Once it began restoring (note the size increase indicator), there was a warning dialog to be expected (below) later.
Universal Restore does not recognise the *VMBus device and asked for a driver. This device appeared to be the Virtual Machine Bus Network Adapter supplied by Hyper-V. This driver is supplied in Hyper-V Integration Services disc, so I could only install it after restoration and booting the OS in the new virtual machine.
After installing Integration Servces, the OS was able to use the ne VM Bus network adapter and use of the Legacy Network adapter could be disabled. And with that, my physical server has been transported to a new virtual hardware base.
I expected more things to break, so I was pleased that the process was reasonably smooth (other than the other gotchas mentioned). Acronis Universal Restore certainly made moving operating systems across hardware a lot easier. But of course, my server was not some complicated clustered setup, so your mileage may vary.