I try to move WIndows Server 2008 from ancient hardware (2 cores, 2GB ram) to new machine.
Right now, as I restore the whole system on VM, I can’t get it booted, after few fails it goes into recovery mode where I can restore whole system once again.
I can install similar version of WS2008 on VM, but not sure how to get installed progs with minimal hassle.
Any suggestions?
What are you using for a hypervisor, and virtual machine setup?
Many VM solutions offer a “legacy” mode, that emulates a bios, old school scsi/ata, etc. You’ll want to build a container that most closely matches the old system. What error are you getting when you try to boot your vm after restoring a backup? It’s probably missing storage drivers. Some P2V tools take care of this for you, inserting drivers into the image as they capture it. Other times, they leave it up to you to take care of.
WS08 is rather ancient and won’t run (properly) on modern hardware as it was never designed/destined for that. Buy a license for Win-10 and re-install from there.
@gordonthree
I use qemu on Fedora 31 Server Edition, configured with Cockpit.
Not sure about error messages, it’s a blue screen among them, but it goes so fast, can’t get a look at it.
The tip with storage drivers could be vital, physical machine uses Raid 1, but I have no idea how to change it.
Could it be that I use too new host system? When I try to create a VM, I had to chose Microsoft Windows Server 2016. Installing WS2008 on it goes well, just fails to boot after loading backup.
Should I try different virtualization programs? (VirtualBox, VMware).
@Dutch_Master
One of 3 installed programs is out of our reach to install it again, so it would be great to keep them all.
Not sure how modern Windows does it, years ago there was this tool called sysprep.
The downside is that using it might mess up your server setup - make sure you’ve made a backup with something like clonezilla just in case
Does your entire shop run on Fedora? I’d recommend something more mainstream like HyperV or ESXi (both free)
Although using the virt-manager gui it should build an “old enough” container.
If your original system booted off a raid array, that’s your problem. Does that system still work? Might be worth trying to use the free VMware P2V tool to capture an image, qemu will be able to read it just fine. Hopefully the VMware tool can massage the boot sequence for you… Otherwise time to dig deep into Google for voodoo like moving a raid 1 system to non raid hardware (leave out the virtual part.)
@qbecks: I understand, but if a program is no longer available, neither is support for it. If your operations rely on it, it’s time to find an alternative. Especially in a commercial setting.
@risk - thanks, I’ll try it out as last resort. Physical machine still running fine so I try to avoid bigger changes there.
@gordonthree - it’s a first non-windows computer in the network, so I’m free to take something else, thanks for suggestions. VMware P2V sounds good, could be better then Windows Backup Server I use right now.
@Dutch_Master - the program we can’t reinstall contains some old data we need to consult few times a year. Other then that it’s not used anymore.
How about checking IDE vs AHCI mode? Depending on the age of the hardware, that could be the issue.
So you may need to restore to a virtual IDE disk vs a virual AHCI disk.
Took a better look on physical machine:
Maybe no raid, but if it’s booting from the raid controller, that would cause a blue screen when it can’t find the OS disk where it is expecting it.
is Esxi a free licence in a SME/commercial setting anyway? or just homelab?
I guess it’s probably small number of cores/nodes whatevs for free, but a second socket / large number of cores trips over to business level?
[EDIT: actually read the thing…]
Customers can use ESXi as part of a paid vSphere edition or with the free vSphere Hypervisor edition,
Converting Windows (XP/2003 and newer) to a VM on KVM or ESXi:
Create the VM with the hard drive as an old IDE. Then Windows will boot-up, but very slowly. Shutdown.
Add a second disk drive, this one under a VirtIO/Paravirt controller, can be small, 90MB or so. Boot-up Windows again, and wait for it to go through and install the drivers for the new disk. For old version of Windows you need to provide the VirtIO driver disk. Make sure you can see the second drive in Disk Mgmt, partition and format it. Shutdown.
Delete your second disk. Convert your primary disk from IDE to VirtIO/ParaVirt. Your Windows VM will now boot-up much more quickly. Install VMWare-tools or the VirtIO drivers disk to get networking, high res display, etc.