Generating VM Ware images ?

[phlampe]

Hello All !

 

I've been running happily Retrospect 7.6 on a Windows 2003 SBS server for some years now, and it's time to upgrade to 7.7 (because of some Win 7 clients popping up).

 

I'm also in the process of setting up a VM Ware server in case my client computers fail miserably and would be unable to restart quickly because of hardware problems. My idea is to have a copy of those computers as virtual machines, ready to be started when needed.

 

Is there a way, a tool, an utility that could generate a vm disk from Retrospects backup sets ? It would save time and end-user patience if I could use the backup sets this way instead of taking a new snapshot of the end-user computers with some P2V tool every day ?

 

(I have another way of doing this, involving Ghost and some conversion tools from VMWare but it would be also redundant with Retrospect backups.)

 

Thanks for your help,

Paul-Henri

 

[Richy_Boy]

Well, if VMware wasn't on the cards then the 7.7 recovery CD allows you to restore your machines to any tin you like (I believe).

 

However, from testing, I couldn't get the CD to launch using vmware, it would just hang - driver issues were the cause from memory.

 

If you can get the 7.7 Recovery CD to launch, there's no reason why you couldn't recover the machine to a VM directly from retrospect.

 

The RS team didn't seem interested in fixing the issue back then, so now they're no longer part of EMC there's even less chance

 

Rich

Edited October 11, 2010 by Guest

[Richy_Boy]

Update: Having just tried I seem to have got further than before.

 

Using the Recovery CD that works with 7.7 (boots with WinPE and starts a RS client) I can restore my physical machine into a VM, although when I start it up it bluescreens due to storage driver issues. i.e. the server I tried has a SATA RAId controller in place...

 

Would probably work find with a bog-standard single disk arrangement on something later than Windows 2000 Server (as I was testing with).

 

I didn't get anywhere near the stage of being able to push data before, so I'm not sure what's changed on my system!?

 

Rich

Edited October 11, 2010 by Guest

[phlampe]

Thanks for your answer, Richy, but I'm not trying to restore to a running VM (I supposed this worked well with no glitch, but thanks to your post, it seems my assumption was ... wrong...)

 

In fact, I'm asking about an equivalent tool or method to the VMWare vCenter Converter tool: http://www.vmware.com/products/converter/

or to the one included with Ghost (beginning with version 14 I think) that can be run interactively (cf Ghost 15 function list here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_(software)#Norton_Ghost_15.0 )

 

It roughly allows you to generate a ready to boot VM disk image from Ghost's disk images, and you can do it offline, I mean have a job running on your server in off-peak hours and have the vm disk files sitting in your server waiting to be booted in case of a crash.

 

So my question is if there's something equivalent that could do it from Retrospects images (rdf files, or logical disk images) and generate a VM disk, without having to do a manual restore on a running VM.

 

Thanks for your help or any idea,

Paul-Henri