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I’ve got a server on a VM on VMWare ESXi 5.5, and I need to move it to a physical server (the same hardware as a matter of a fact). We made a mistake in visualizing the serve, and need it to be a physical, and need to do it on the exact same hardware. Any ideas of where to start?

@VMware @Acronis

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Don’t hear this request too often.

Are you using a backup/recovery solution? Perhaps the easiest would be to take a backup and restore to bare metal.

Cheers

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I think this can do virtual to physical: Disk2vhd - Sysinternals | Microsoft Learn

Another method is run something like CloneZilla or Active@ disk image in the VM, then dump the image back to a physical machine - should work after Windows re-installs some drivers.

Personally I wouldn’t do any of this, why not just start over and build the system again on the physical machine?

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You’d be best off starting from scratch. The tools exist, but I wouldn’t trust a business critical server to them.

Why was it a mistake?

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Install ESXi to the new physical server move the VM over, and just give it all the resources of the HOST you can??? What is the overriding factor in going back to Physical?

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Agreed.

Part of the P2V process is modifying the system drivers and how they behave. It may be possible to revert relatively cleanly, but I’d imagine there’d be a lot of kinks to work out.

Short of starting from scratch I’d restore from a recent backup (likely the one you did prior to the P2V) and merge changes.

One option might be using something like Unitrends (You might qualify for the NFR version), you can do dissimilar recovery and it does work reasonably well, I’ve never done V2P, but it might be worth a shot if the backups are too old.

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Acronis does a bare-metal recovery option in their back solution that “may” work in this situation, but you’d better check it with them.

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Here is the situation. Its our backup server, it took a lot of time to get it working right. BUT it has the ability to visualize a backup, but it has to be on its own physical server. I’m going to need to take an image of the VM, wipe the RAID array, and dump the image back onto the same array as a physical. Once I know the best way to do this, i’m certain it will take less time to go V2P than it will to start over from scratch.

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Yes … but getting to the “know the best way” bit may well take much, much longer.

Also, was the initial setup process not documented? Generally speaking, the hard part in “getting something to work right” goes away once things have been configured and are working.

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You’re going to want to build it from scratch. Most backup software has the ability to export it’s configurations, at the very least, the backup jobs. Do it the right way this time, or you’re very likely to run into some very strange errors.

It may have taken a lot of time to get working right, but you will have knowledge gained from the first time, and I’m betting it will take much less time the 2nd time.

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Well, you could use our IT Edition to take a hot backup and easily V2P your virtual system. StorageCraft ShadowProtect IT Edition leverages our Hardware Independent Restore technology to clear and then set drivers for your new environment–whether that environment is bare metal or a hypervisor. You can take an unlimited number of backups or do an unlimited number of restores during the subscription period (anywhere from 2 wks to 1 year), so the more you do the better the value. This is definitely an easy way to get the job done.

Cheers

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Unitrends can absolutely help you migrate P2P, P2V, V2V, or V2P, but it can depend a bit on the OS in question. What guest OS is this client running?

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I have done this with much success using clonezilla. Cant hurt to try clonezilla since its free, so worse case is that it doesnt work, can always try something else. :slight_smile:

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I take it then that when you went P2V you didn’t take a fresh backup, otherwise you would have just restored. Even if you have an older OS backup, depending on the backup software in question you should be able to just merge the data, maybe export a config and then merge.

I’d need to know what you’re running as backup, and what OS you’re running on, but in theory:

  1. Back up the Virtual Server to another machine

  2. Restore a pre-virtual Backup onto the server

  3. Merge data/configs

The amount of time required is going to depend on how much data you’re dealing with, but that should be quicker than a fresh install.

If you don’t have a good backup, then you’d going to probably want to start from scratch, again depending on what you’re working with and the type of backups you have you should be able to bang this out pretty quickly.

It sounds like your backup software can, or needs to spin up a backup as a VM, so that’s not going to work since you can’t nest hypervisors like that.

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There is no pre-virtual. it will built on the VmWare Host

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Clonezilla, can it restore the image to a RAID array? I don’t have a physical hard drive I can remove to install onto. I’d need to boot to some utility I imagine.

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I’m running Server 2012 R2 Standard.

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Kyle,

Andy is absolutely right - Acronis Universal Restore is perfect for V2P situations.

Acronis Backup fully supports backing up Virtual and restoring to any Physical server. It will let you inject hardware (e.g. RAID) drivers, and will take care of HAL, CPU and Network cards.

We have numerous customers using V2P scenario - for example those who use Virtual DR site. Once the primary site is back and rebuilt, they need to move virtual machines back to physical.

Just grab a trial and check it out.

@Acronis

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You’ll need to do a BMR with software that allows you to side-load drivers.

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You sure your backup server has to be on a physical server? I currently have an Axcient appliance as a VM that can host VMs of its own. Did the vendor tell you that it should be done this way? If not, I would at least test the process to see if it works. It may be a case of a vendor just saying this for support reasons.

At any rate, I haven’t had much luck P2Ving from a BMR image much less V2P. It will be blue screen city if you don’t get it right.

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