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Let me explain and hopefully not confuse anyone. I have a server with 2016. It host a program that is no longer available, in fact the guy who built it passed away and support doesn’t exist. The company is in the process of moving to netsuite but the conversation time is 19 months so we are paranoid about this app.

Can I take a full bare metal backup image from the built-in server backup and completely restore it to a new piece of hardware without having to resinstall the program or is there an image software that would accomplish this. The goal is we would have a backup in the event this thing dies without the ability to have this software resinstalled as it no longer exist or rather support is no longer?

Thanks in advance

9 Spice ups
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Without knowing the specifics of the software off I am thinking veeam free may be able to help you out.

You can backup a server and restore it different hardware using their bare metal recovery. Can’t say I have done it in recent years but I remember test restoring backups to different disks without issue.

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To be honest, I would look at virtualizing this machine and just power down the physical server and kept it safe somewhere to use a last ditch recovery.

In a previous job, we used Veeam to grab images of physical machines in our Dev domain and turned them into virtual system without any major issues - just the standard DNS and DHCP stuff that you would need to do anyway from a restore.

Once you virtualize the system and verify that it’s in proper order, make a “golden” image and store that separately in case something goes wonky with the virtual system and use it, along with your backups, to restore.

2 Spice ups
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Its currently on VMWARE, the hardware is very antiquated and the drives are on an an EMC that is not replaceable. I was hoping to move it to native hardware but VM is probably easier. There is a database SQL for the app to run and I back that up everyday.

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Hey Kevin, if it’s currently a VM, you easily move the machine to a new hypervisor. If I remember correctly, it took me more time to copy the VMDKs and other files than the actual spinning up.

If you have a image, you could also use VEEAM to do a bare metal restore to dissimilar hardware, although I haven’t had any experience with that.

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Here is what I would do is just migrate the VM to a new VMWare host. You can get a VMWare essentials kit for $600ish bucks now, that also comes with vCenter. This way you just pick a night power off the VM and vmotion it over to the new host, power it back on and call it a day.

If your pre-existing VMWare host is licenses, I would just use Veeam Backup and Replication to back up the VM. THen if the host dies you can just restore the VM to a new VMWare host.

But the best would be get new hardware, purchase the essentials kit, setup vCenter, user vmotion to move the VM. Then still use Veeam Backup and Replication to backup the VM. You could even go as far as using the old VMWare host as a replication server as well. This might get a bit more complicated depending on what version of VMWare you are running.

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If ‘the drives’ are on an external SAN, just make sure that the backup you take includes EVERY aspect of that VM, so you can do the restore/move without any nasty surprises. Yes, the VMs are hardware independent. They only see a fixed set of virtual devices, and are largely unaware of the World outside. Our consultants just migrated our servers from VMWare to HyperV, and only one application was ‘smart’ enough to notice a change, and trigger it’s license alert.

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Okay I have better information now. The old server has an EMC server that host the drives, and a separate HP that has the VMware. The only inventory on that current ESXI I want is a webserver, I would like to move this to my new vmware server and like I said the physical drives are supplied by the emc and are not on the hardware that has ESXI.
The current setup is ESXI 5.5, I downloaded ESXI 7.0 both are free verisons because I only need 1 guest which is only 41 gigs total including os.
I am not a VMware expert but I would like to move that one server from the old setup to the new one?
What would be the best method to accomplish this, I can have some downtime to accomplish this so it doesn’t need to be with no down time.

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I would highly recommend you CLONING that virtual machine instead of migrating it to have the original instance untouched and to have two copies of that machine just in case since it is pretty critical. Use the free V2V Converter V2V Converter / P2V Converter - Converting VM Formats tool that will connect to both hypervisors you have (no matter the version) and clone the virtual machine from one to another without downtime.

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Thanks everyone, it has been moved. Ran into a domain trust issue that I need to post about but I will do that seperately.

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