Migrate Apps on the Fly

Imagine this-you have 50 different mid-sized servers to perform varied
roles such as mailing, protection against spam, acting as a firewall, ADS, and
so on. But your IT bosses have decided for an immediate consolidation of
resources and have ordered a migration of these servers into 10 high-end
servers. To do so, let's suppose you decide to take the virtualization way.
For this you would need to create create 5 virtual machines in each of the 10
high-end servers and migrate the services on top of them.

But this means that you need to reinstall the OS in each of the 50 virtual
machines and deploy and configure the services on top of them. This in turn
means spending sleepless nights in office. One way out of this would be to
convert your existing hard disks to VM HDDs with just three or four mouse
clicks. This will make sure that all your installation, configuration and user
data is intact in that VM HDD, without requiring any migration or
reinstallation. Sounds interesting? To make this possible, we are going to use a
software called WinImage to capture system images and host them on MS Virtual
Server.

Installation

First of all we need WinImage, which is available as a fully functional 30-day
shareware. You can download it from www.winimage.com/download.htm.
Make sure that you are downloading the latest version of the application
(currently 8.0), as older versions of WinImage don't have this feature. After
it is downloaded, run the installer and follow the installation wizard. All you
have to do is to click the next button until the application is installed on
your machine.

Creating image

Take the hard-disk of the machine you want to create the VM Image of and
connect it as a secondary hard-disk to the machine where you've installed
WinImage 8.0. Now, run WinImage80.exe to start the interface. Go to Disks Menu
and click on the Option that says 'Create Virtual Disk Image from Physical
Disk...' This opens a new window.

Earlier, you migrated data while shifting servers. However, using WinImage you can directly capture the old OS and use it on top of a virtual environment or migrate it to a new server

Selecting HDD

In the window click on the check box which says 'Include Non-removable Hard
disk also.' This will show all hard disks connected to the machine. Now select
the hard disk whose image you want to create. Most likely the name of the hard
disk will be 'Disk 1,' if it is connected as the secondary hard disk. There
is one more configuration required in this window. While creating the virtual
disk image, you have two different options. One is to create a fixed disk in
which the size of the virtual disk will be fixed and equal to the size of the
physical disk. The other one is to create a virtual disk which of the same size
as the used space in the physical disk. In this case, the disk will be Dynamic
Expandable and will increase with the increase in data.

Select the disk you want to create an image for. You can also choose whether to create a fixed or expanding disk

The second option is useful if you have a good amount of disk space in the
Virtual Server. You can set this option by selecting the radio button at the
bottom of this window. Next, it will ask you to provide a path where you want to
save the created image. Creation of the Virtual Disk will take a good amount of
time which can vary from 10 minutes to an hour depending on the size of the
physical disk you are converting.

Attaching a virtual disk

Now go to the Virtual Server Management console. Click on 'Create' under the
Virtual Machine Menu. This will open a page where you have to provide the name
of the VM, RAM and HDD details. Here, provide values for each except the HDD.
Now go to the 'Virtual Hard Disk' option and select the second option which
says 'Use an existing Virtual Hard disk' and fill in the UNC path of the
virtual hard disk which you have just created in the 'File name (.vhd)' box.

Now click on 'Create' and you are through with it. Start the VM by going
to the Master Status and clicking on the virtual machine. But while booting it
for the first time, remember that the OS will stop and configure all new
devices. Be careful at this stage and follow all driver installation procedures.
It shouldn't be a big problem as most of the Windows and Linux based Oses
detect all the MSVS hardware quite easily.

Select the second option in the 'Virtual hard disk' section and provide the path of the disk

Migrating to a new server

Using WinImage, you can totally eliminate the need of a Virtual Server and still
migrate the existing hard disk Image to a new server. To do so follow the
instructions till Step 3.

When the VHD file is created, remove the hard-disk where you have created the
image and instead place the new hard disk where you want to transfer the content
of the first disk. Go to 'Options' menu and select the option which says 'Restore
Virtual Hard Disk Image to a physical disk.' A new window will open. Select
the appropriate disk in the window and click on OK.