can I move a storage vmdk from one vm to another and retain permissions and shares?

[Thunder88]

Hello,

I have an aging fileserver (WinSrv2k) that I have converted to vm and I've been running it in this form for about 6 months. While it is more stable, the issues that the old heap was having are still showing up in the virtual machine. The primary data was stored in a separate drive partition and I would like to just pull that data drive vmdk off that server and attach it to another without killing the shares and permissions. Is this as simple as it sounds or will I need to use the robocopy tool to transfer the data to a new vmdk on the replacement fileserver vm?

[jb12345]

Are the permissions local or domain?

[Thunder88]

Domain based access and share permissions

[Rumple]

it works just like putting a drive from one system into another in the physical world.

Your shares will need to be exported from the original system and imported on the other system - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/125996

Moving the drive to another VM thats in the same domain will allow it to retain the NTFS partitions.

However, all logon scripts, etc will need to be adjusted to point to the new server name if necessary.

If you want to get creative you can also create a new CNAME alias for the file shares (instead of mapping to
servername\shares), you can map to
mysharedfiles\shares and then follow these instructions to enable the new server to accept connections using
mysharedfiles - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/281308

Allows you to use friendly names to map drives, makes it easier to move your shares around in the future and is nice planning for DR...