THE OFFICIAL BLOG OF THE SBS "DIVA"

And I'm not talking about the cleaning products either!

http://www.holycowproducts.com/

I'm talking about the Disk2VHD tool here:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/ee656415.aspx

So merely using that... we first make VHDs of our existing physical box.  Mind you the first time I tried to cheat and only backup the C and the E as the F is data, but because the E and F are on a single volume, the system would not fully load those two drives.  So make sure if you have multiple drives on a single volume that you backup the drives on that volume as a whole.

I backed it up on an external usb harddrive.  It took from about 10 p.m to 3 a.m to back up my entire server.  I then moved the usb harddrive over to the new HyperV server and copied the VHD files over to the new server.  I set up the settings for the new SBS 2003 on the server with 4 gigs of ram, 4 processors, and two harddrives, matching the vhd's and browsing to their location on the box.  I then turned on the HyperV server, sat back and waited for the blue screen......

THAT NEVER OCCURRED.  Yes, you read that right.  I took a physical SBS 2003 that was installed with HP management software on a five year old ML370 G4 and plopped it up into a HyperV sitting on a brand new ML370 G6 and there was no blue screen freak out.

Once it booted up in indicated it would need a new activation in three days and that the hardware had change significantly (no kidding dude, that hardware has definitely changed)

Keep in mind should I need to activate this box, I will not impact the running box (as in it will not suck over the activation from the running box).  And normally they are more lenient on servers than they are on workstations and most of the time they will activate again just fine.  The only gotcha you need to watch is two things:

1.  OEM installs should not be doing this from a licensing standpoint.  You are not legal to move that license from an OEM to a HyperV.  The license is bound to that hardware.

2.  Some (not all but some) OEM builds may be BIOS locked.  Certainly the new Foundation Server in the 2008 era has a bios check to ensure it's on HP true hardware and will not install in a virtual setting.  I've even seen some SBS 2008 reseller kits that have this bios check as well. 

So OEMs should not be using this methodology at all.

[Before the licensing police come and say I shouldn't activate this as I still have my running SBS 2003, keep in mind I have SA so I have cold server rights.  Granted the server isn't cold but the only reason I'm doing this is to give me a means to fully and completely and utterly to test my SBS 2003 to SBS 2008 migration in a sandbox before I do it on the real network.  So if anyone wants to arrest me for MS licensing non compliance, you have three weeks to lock me up.  Ping me via the contact box for directions to my office.]

Because the OS is 2003 and not the nice 2008s or Vista/Win7 era that has the hyperV integration bits preinstalled, to get a mouse working remotely you have to go up in the tools and install the HyperV extensions and hit the tab key a lot to get it installed and then reboot it.  Once it comes back up you now need to clean out the old physical nics.

If you try to go in there and reset up the nic with the original IP address you get a warning from the box that network cards are still there:

But if you go into device manager they won't be there.

Step 1: Open up a command prompt

Step 2: Type – “SET DEVMGR_SHOW_NONPRESENT_DEVICES=1″ and hit

Step 3: Type – “START DEVMGMT.MSC” and hit

Step 4: Once the Device Manger opens to the “View” menu and select “Show Hidden Devices”. Expand the Network Interface portion of the device tree and you should be able to remove the phantom NIC.

The go back in and put in the static nic entries and rerun the CEICW (in SBS 2003) and the Fix my network wizard in SBS 2008.

In my case as well, since I have this HyperV box hanging off a totally separate IP address right now, it was not authorized by Exchange Defender to email out, so until I enter in a trouble ticket to add this server temporarily as an authorized outbound emailer through the Exchange defender network, I just bounced it off the smtpauth.sbcglobal.com for the time being to fully test the functions of the box.  So it's actually kinda funny now as I am getting monitoring emails from the two servers now and I actually had to go back in and edit the from address so I'd know which one was coming from the HyperV box and which one was from the regular still running box.

But the beauty of this is, is that I can now do a full trial run of the SBS 2003 to SBS 2008 migration in a sandbox that won't impact my real machine.  Furthermore, should I decide to do so, when it comes time to do the real migration I can theoretically redo this PtoV that I've done here and start the migration from the virtual SBS2003, this time of course turning off/blocking the old existing machine from putting in email during this migration timeframe.  This then leaves the old existing SBS 2003 totally intact and non impacted by the migration process.