I've recently duplicated our producion environment into VM's to allow us to test upgrades and patches without having to arrange outage windows, come in on the weekend or waste a night rebuilding a production server after a patch went bad.
After much trial and error, using Ghost, Barts PE with the Ultimate P2V plugin and LiveState Recovery, I've found the following method to work perfectly every time:
1) Start with a VM running a clean OS install + VMWare tools. Make sure you are runing the same version and service pack version as that of the system you want to restore
2) Use NTBACKUP to take a copy of the windows partition and system state of the physical machine. Copy the resulting BKF file into your clean guest OS.
3) Use NTBACKUP to restore the system state + C drive into your VM. Because ntbackup keeps the hardware specific registry settings of the machine it's restoring to, you shouldn't see the STOP 0x7 error on restart.
4) After restoring, restart the guest OS. If everything starts, logon to the guest, reinstall VMWare tools and be happy. If you've restored from a Compaq (HP) server you might find the system hangs after the bios but before the Windows logo. Compaq/HP servers seem to use a different HAL from your run of the mill acapi HAL which doesn't agree with VMWare. In this case:
5) Boot from the Windows 2003 setup CD. (Hint: convert it to an ISO, copy it to your VMware host and attach it to your virtual CD ROM drive - Windows Setup will boot about 60% to 70% faster!)
6) Start the recovery console and drop to a command line
7) copy \WINDOWS\ServicePackFiles\i386\HALAACPI.DLL \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\HAL.DLL (overwrite the existing file)
8) Exit the recovery console and watch your VM boot (hopefully!) Install VMTools and be happy.
So far, this method has worked perfectly for me. There hasn't been a single machine that has failed to run or given me problems after restoring.
My questions are:
Is anyone aware of any problems with this method? and, seeing as it works so well, what benfit is there using a commercial P2V product? We've actually just purchased Symantec Live State with the restore anywhere option for our production servers, to allow us to restore them into VM's for disaster recovery purposes. I'm starting to regret this decision now, as it would appear I could have done the same thing with good old NTBACKUP!