Hi all!
I'm new to the forum and have already posted 1 question. I was extremely surprised by the speed and accuracy of forum replies (even though my issue ultimately did not have to do with the product, but lack of communication between myself and my assistant).
I have a new one though. I'm the admin of a power co. that has 17 of it's own servers and hosts 11 other servers for "client" companies. These are all M$-centric. Due to new disaster recovery stipulations in the industry, I'm researching the feasibility of backing up to SAN (both data and images) and then having the SAN replicate to another SAN at a remote location. My company can get away with 6 M$ servers bare minimum, but I have to replicate all 11 client servers.
For disaster recovery I'd like to be able to buy a couple of Quad Opteron dual core machines with 32 Gb RAM each and allocate some space on the remote SAN (Promise M500i iSCSI SATA raid) for virtual machines and then (in case of emergency) use the images, after they have been filtered through P2V, on the virtual machines so a running system is up and available in a couple of hours with most, if not all, previous data. I figure in emergency circumstances I could squeeze 9 M$ vm's onto each host machine running linux as host OS.
Since machine and networking are going to be costly (about $100K non budgeted) I'm trying to cut corners on the software side and have been trying a imaging solution called DriveImages XML (freeware) from Runtime software. It can do a "hot" image of the machine it's running on (XP/2003 ONLY) by using M$ VSS.
It has worked great up to a point.
I can image the target (for testing purposes a 2K3 std. machine built in VMware to negate the need for P2V as yet) and save it to a mapped share.
I can apply the image (using a Bart's CD w/ the DriveImage plugin....well, actually and ISO of it) to a new VM AFTER using diskpart to create, and set active, a partition.
I CAN'T boot the newly imaged vm (hangs at a black screen with upper lefthand corner cursor like the one that shows for a fraction of a sec before boot.ini loads).
All the data is there, the drive is marked active, the source and destination drives are the same (11Gb virtual disks split into 2Gb files NOT completely allocated on different dedicated partitions), but the image will not boot.
I'd like to ask if someone else has run into this AND/OR to ask for stories of this type of cloning (using LiveState, Acronis, etc.), either successful or not.
Any insight and ideas will be greatly appreciated!