VMware Servers Backup Step by Step Checklists

1. I used the alt-boot full image method to create an image of the entire /dev/hda hard drive to an NFS mount on the new VMware server. (These images were typically 410 GB. They were old servers!)

2. I used VMware to create a virtual machine specifying a virtual IDE hard drive that was much bigger than the original, usually about 20 or 40 GB.

3. I used VMware to create a virtual CD drive that pointed to an ISO file that was actually a symbolic link to an ISO image of a Knoppix CD on the hard drive.

4. I booted the virtual machine into Knoppix using the virtual Knoppix CD.

5. I used dd to copy the image of the real hard drive to the virtual hard drive in the virtual machine booted from the virtual CD. (We did this by mounting the NFS drive where we stored the image.)

6. I "removed" the Knoppix CD by changing the symbolic link to point to an ISO image of a nonbootable CD and rebooted the virtual server.

In almost every case, the virtual server came up without incident, and voila! I had moved a physical server into a virtual server without a hitch! One Windows server was blue-screening during the boot, but I pressed F8 and selected Last Known Good Configuration, and it booted just fine.

7. I installed VMware tools into each virtual machine, which made their video and other drivers much happier.

Once I verified the health of each machine, I changed the CD symbolic link to point to Knoppix again and booted into Knoppix. I then used either qtparted (for Linux systems) or fdisk and ntfsresize (for Windows systems) to grow the original hard drive to the new size, as discussed in the sidebar "Restoring to Larger Hard Drives" in Chapter 11.

Backup & Recovery, W. Preston 2006