P2V Our SBS2003

[AndersJuulJense]

Hello all

We have recently bought a new Dell Host so we can run our entire enviroment on that host.

Dell Host w/ESXi 5.1 (it was installed last week).

The host is configured with 2 x 2GHz, 64GB Ram and 8x 600GB SAS in Raid 10 running with Vmware Essentials

We have 4 guest OS currently running:

2 x Winxp

1 x Srv2008 recently P2V

1 x Srv2008 moved from old host/datastorage

the last task I have is to P2V our old SBS2003 which currently runs on a HP ML350G4/5

I have on several occasions tried to P2V it and get various errors:

Biosinfo.inf is missing or corrupt, no boot/error just hangs on Black sceen and a general error while running the converter.

As i read some of the posts im quite sure all theese errors are caused by me not following "best practice". Cold P2V was mentioned ...

So in short:

If I want to P2V our SBS2003 so I can use Veeam backup software and finally migrate our SBS2003 to SBS2011 what should I do?
I do hope my question make sense and people can contribute

Thank you in advance.

well did a converter standalone, in AD restore mode. Booting up it complained about biosinfo.inf. Found a WinXP and copied the file to the VMDK C: and started the Virtual SBS2003. Now it boots up. Add a NIC and set it up to the old IP-adresses,  start DNS and server seems up and running. My only issue now is that, it says: found new hardware (lots of PCI to PCI Bridge) which it can't install because of missing drivers. If I run the "install guide" and choose not to install and not to prompt Again it fails on the following boot. For some reason after it with SPTD.SYS error on loading. If I let the "new hardware found" remain untouched everything seems to be running fine. I can logon to Exchange/OWA, Sharepoint, start our Navision, start DHCP, look in DNS ... Message was edited by: AndersJuulJensen

[POCEH]

Do you try to install vmware-tools on VM? (make snapshot before just in case)

[Cyberfed27]

FYI its never a good practice to take a domain controller that was physical and turn it into a VM.

[AndersJuulJense]

@POCEH: well I did make a few migrate tests and I can install "Tools" on it after the initial bootup.

My issue is that it pops up with alot of "PCI Bridge to PCI" (20 or so) and a few SCSI Devices and some IDE Devices. THe drivers can't be installed and if I just click continue and choose "do not ask again" it crashes on following boot with 0x0000007b

If leave the "hardware changes" everything actually runs smoothly AND better than on our Physical device.

@Cyberfed27: Im aware of this issue (time/sync/legal matters and so forth) but i think I can manage theese.

Im able to shut down ENTIRE enviroment over a few days, set SBS in AD Restore mode, run virtual and boot up the other 2 servers.

Reason for this is to make it easier to test SBS2003-->SBS2011 migration ....

I really DO not trust our current SBS2003 because it was set up in panic some years ago because of a server crash.