Virtualization

  • 1.  vmware

    Posted Jul 11, 2008 05:31 PM

    Which VMWare product would allow me to recover my computer from a virtual image in the event that the primary hard drive died?



  • 2.  RE: vmware

    Posted Jul 11, 2008 05:36 PM

    VCB, here is the link.

    If your host died, all you do is rebuild your host, patch it to current level, and bring back the VM's to the hard drive. I'm thinking you don't have a connect LUN by what I'm reading.

    Hope that helped. :smileyhappy:



  • 3.  RE: vmware

    Posted Jul 11, 2008 05:37 PM

    No current product can do that - you may want to look at Acronis-Universal Restore

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    description of vmx-parameters:

    VMware-liveCD:



  • 4.  RE: vmware

    Posted Jul 11, 2008 06:56 PM

    Brian - you see contradicting answers

    If you talk about ESX listen to William - if you talk about a standalone regular computer listen to me

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    description of vmx-parameters:

    VMware-liveCD:



  • 5.  RE: vmware

    Posted Jul 11, 2008 07:58 PM

    Hello,

    Continuum is sort of correct. If you use VMware Converter to P2V your Desktop to a VM, then you can then use VMware Converter to V2P your VM to physical. However, it would not be 100% the same. Drivers, etc come into place. But there is no tool that is 100% automatic.


    Best regards,

    Edward L. Haletky

    VMware Communities User Moderator

    ====

    Author of the book 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', Copyright 2008 Pearson Education.

    CIO Virtualization Blog: http://www.cio.com/blog/index/topic/168354

    As well as the Virtualization Wiki at http://www.astroarch.com/wiki/index.php/Virtualization



  • 6.  RE: vmware

    Posted Jul 11, 2008 08:37 PM

    After I made my post I did a little more digging. It seems to me that my best option would be VMWare Converter. Why would drivers come into play if I restoring back to the same computer?

    I wasn't expecting to get a few replies this quick so I'd like to hear additional thoughts, if you would enlighten me.



  • 7.  RE: vmware

    Posted Jul 11, 2008 09:52 PM

    Which VMWare product would allow me to recover my computer from a virtual image in the event that the primary hard drive died?

    Are you saying that you want to recover the virtual machine's files when the physical hard drive on the host that these files are stored on fails? The answer is what would you normally do when your hard drive fails: you restore from backup. You do backup your virtual machine, correct? Or at least you do backup the data inside your virtual machine?


    If you mean that when a physical machine's hard drive dies, that you want to copy some arbitrary virtual machine to physical, then as Edward (Texiwill) is saying, you can use Converter, but it's not automatic. The drivers thing is because the virtual hardware is almost certainly not going to be the same as your physical hardware, so you may have to get the proper drivers installed before being able to use the newly loaded physical machine. Making a virtual machine from the specific physical machine in question using Converter will minimize the work necessary to get the proper drivers reinstalled.


    But IMO restoring a physical hard drive is not something that a VMWare product will do. Instead, use some disk imaging program like Ghost or Trueimage. If ESX, then like William said, use VCB.