Creating a Fixed VHD in Windows 7 and a ShadowProtect P2V

We have a VHD creation process running in the Windows 7 Disk Management console:

The above VHD is being created on a network share hosted by one of our Hyper-V servers (2008 R2). It will be a 160GB fixed VHD that will host the Windows 7 machine’s OS once ShadowProtect is finished.

While that process is running ShadowProtect is taking an image of the Windows 7 machine as it will be P2Vd onto the above Hyper-V host.

This image is running to a 2008 R2 file server.

The machine is a Core i7-875K with a pair of 80GB Intel X25-M SSDs running in RAID 0 and is soon to be retired.

We will use our P2V Hyper-V Integration Services (previous blog post) step to get rid of the RAID signature and enable IS in the OS. Then, we will use our Hardware Independent Restore (previous blog post) steps to clean out any left-over devices from the physical machine.

We find out of all products available to us, including Microsoft’s own Disk2VHD too, that ShadowProtect gives us the most reliable method of moving a physical machine into a virtual setting or taking a VM and restoring it to hardware.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

Chef de partie in the SMBKitchen
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Windows Live Writer

HP P2V – Make Sure to Stop and Disable HP Services

The SBS and SQL servers we restored to our newly created 2 node Hyper-V cluster were originally installed on HP hardware.

Once the P2V process using the native Windows Server Backup to restore to Hyper-V completed the restore process automatically rebooted the VMs.

One of the first things we noticed was that that vCPUs were running at a constant 100%. The Task Manager Processes tab showed a series of HP/CPQ services causing the problem.

So, we went in and disabled all of the services then shut them down.

Once we rebooted the VMs the HP services were no longer an issue.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

P2V Using ShadowProtect V4.x – Quicker But with BSOD 0x0000007B for Windows Server 2003 R2 in Hyper-V

When we were running P2V processes using v3 of ShadowProtect we were waiting quite a while as the ShadowProtect Recovery Environment did not work too well on the Hyper-V side.

ShadowProtect version 4 uses the Win7/Win2K8 R2 codebase for its Recovery Environment so we get full keyboard and mouse functionality while working via RDP plus a pleasant 20MB/Second as shown above.

The P2V we were running was for a legacy Line of Business application running on Windows 2003 Standard R2 that cannot run on a current OS. Not only that, the LoB does an awesome job for what is does and there is no current application out there that comes even close.

On first boot after doing a straight restore we hit a BSOD: STOP: 0x0000007B

A problem has been detected and Windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer.

Nothing in our searches turned up anything really useful other than a similar error indicating an inaccessible boot device.

• Microsoft KB 324103: Advanced troubleshooting for "Stop 0x0000007B" errors in Windows XP

Since we did not do an HIR for this P2V we went back and ran the restore process again after extracting the Hyper-V Integration Services as explained here:

• winDeploy Blog: Extracting Hyper-V R2 Drivers

The commands are as follows:

1. msiexec /a d:\support\amd64\Windows5.x-HyperVIntegrationServices-x64.msi TARGETDIR=C:\AIPx64
2. msiexec /a d:\support\x86\Windows5.x-HyperVIntegrationServices-x86.msi TARGETDIR=C:\AIPx86

Once we had our x86 version drivers we were able to load all of the Integration Services drivers using the Hardware Independent Restore feature of ShadowProtect. About 20-30 minutes later we had our server back online.

We then ran through the Integration Services install via the Action drop down menu to load the ISO in the VM.

All was good to go from there.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer