From Backup Restore Strategy To a Physical To Virtual Technic

Being in holidays, I was called in an emergency for an Ldap database restore because an application was no more running. The fact is, even if we had an image of disks of the physical server hosting the application, we didn’t have backups for files each on by itself available at this time. So the solution that I proposed was to restore the backup to a new virtual machine, that way, we can recover the files we need and go to run very quickly.

So, what’s the facts? The first one is that the application is not working, and thus, many people cannot work. The server (a Windows 2003 server) is a Dell server backed up with Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery (BESR), a tool that takes drives images so that recovery time is the least, and the last save is available in a network share. I have available too some free resources in an ESX enough to create a new virtual machine to host the server image.

As you noticed, the starting idea was to recover the image  of the physical server to a virtual machine. What I came up with is a new technique to virtualize a physical server, and transform it to a virtual machine. This is thanks to “Restore Anywhere” option available in BESR; in normal restore cases, we will restore to an identical hardware and this option is not needed, but in the scenario I described, the image is going to a virtual hardware. It is good to know that Windows License Product Key will be needed to be able to Activate Windows later on. No need for specific drivers as VMware ones are available by default.

So how we do it?

To be able to “remake” a blank server, BESR comes with a bootable CD that configures the basic information needed to work with the new server : we can configure network interfaces, map network drives,…etc. Once the IP stack is correctly configured (you can issue a “ping” command to the IP used to check if the server is responding) you can use the available wizard to map a drive to the network share hosting the images.

After this basic configuration, you can start recovering the server, or shall I say building the virtualized server. It will take up to 2 hours to restore 50Gb image if the ESX is “normally” used; of course, it may take less time in a test environment. After the first reboot, the server will start configuring the new hardware, this may take up to 15 minutes, so you can go and have a coffee! A question will be asked to you  is that if you need the server to be joined to a domain or you want to keep it in the “workgroup”. It is wise to let it in the workgroup till it becomes available to configure it at your ease.

The server is now up and running; the new virtual server will keep the initial name, applications and so on, but no hardware configuration will remain, neither network configuration. At this point, you can reconfigure your server as you wish.

For me, I was able to backup specific file using ntbackup tool in the new virtual machine and restore them to the original physical server. Please note that if you connect you new virtual machine to the network, and if you keep the same name, it may generate a “duplicate name” TCP/IP error. I bypassed this error by removing any DNS server IP, Wins server IP from network configuration. Also, you will have to disable Netbios naming utilization, so the server will only use IPs to communicate in the network.

I hope you liked this post and found it helpful, and I’d like to thank you for your time.