Windows NT 4 PDC Server + VMWare Server Migration (p2v)
Project Background
Had a customer come to me, needing to upgrade his old server to new hardware since he was having hardware issues on the old machine, and couldn't part with his software, data, and applications on his old server. This server was an NT 4 Service Pack 6 primary domain controller, file server, application server, and print server. Needless to say it was his entire company's backbone, and it was critical that this operation succeeded and without problems. Below is how I managed to pull this one off.
Now the great opportunity of migrating over an old Dell Poweredge 2300 server fitted with a single SCSI hard drive, tape drive, and Windows Small Business Server 4.5 (Windows NT 4 Server Service Pack 6). Below is an outline of how I performed this just in case anyone needs to reference this, or I do later, heh :
Project Tools
Tools I used for the Job:
- New Physical Server running Windows Server 2003 Standard in a software RAID 1 configuration.
- Adaptec SCSI controller with drivers installed on new server.
- A HPDB68 Ultra wide SCSI-3/ Ultra2 LVD SCSI SCSI cable.
- VMWare Server 2.x installed on new server.
- VMWare Converter Standalone 4.0.1 installed on new server.
- Acronis TrueImage Enterprise 9.x installed on new server.
- PowerISO to create a network adapter driver cd image.
And away we go...
First I powered down the physical server. Some would normally go in and disable network adapters, add Microsoft loop back adapter, and the like to conform with VMWare Converter Best Practices, but I was in a hurry =)..