A friend of mine asked me if it's possible to take a hyper-v snapshot of a running (Non virtual) windows 2012 server (Which I think also runs SQL Server). He wants to be able to run and experiment with the Snapshot in the event that the server goes down.
Thanks,
Ole
Yes, It is possible with the tool Disk2vhd.
Disk2vhd is a utility that creates VHD (Virtual Hard Disk - Microsoft's Virtual Machine disk format) versions of physical disks for use in Microsoft Virtual PC or Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs). The difference between Disk2vhd and other physical-to-virtual tools is that you can run Disk2vhd on a system that’s online. Disk2vhd uses Windows' Volume Snapshot capability, introduced in Windows XP, to create consistent point-in-time snapshots of the volumes you want to include in a conversion. You can even have Disk2vhd create the VHDs on local volumes, even ones being converted (though performance is better when the VHD is on a disk different than ones being converted).
The Disk2vhd user interface lists the volumes present on the system:
It will create one VHD for each disk on which selected volumes reside. It preserves the partitioning information of the disk, but only copies the data contents for volumes on the disk that are selected. This enables you to capture just system volumes and exclude data volumes, for example.
Note: Virtual PC supports a maximum virtual disk size of 127GB. If you create a VHD from a larger disk it will not be accessible from a Virtual PC VM.
To use VHDs produced by Disk2vhd, create a VM with the desired characteristics and add the VHDs to the VM's configuration as IDE disks. On first boot, a VM booting a captured copy of Windows will detect the VM's hardware and automatically install drivers, if present in the image. If the required drivers are not present, install them via the Virtual PC or Hyper-V integration components. You can also attach to VHDs using the Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 Disk Management or Diskpart utilities.
Note: do not attach to VHDs on the same system on which you created them if you plan on booting from them. If you do so, Windows will assign the VHD a new disk signature to avoid a collision with the signature of the VHD’s source disk. Windows references disks in the boot configuration database (BCD) by disk signature, so when that happens Windows booted in a VM will fail to locate the boot disk.
Disk2vhd runs on Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, and higher, including x64 systems.
Command Line Usage
Disk2vhd includes command-line options that enable you to script the creation of VHDs. Specify the volumes you want included in a snapshot by drive letter (e.g. c:) or use "*" to include all volumes.
Usage: disk2vhd <[drive: [drive:]...]|[*]>
Example: disk2vhd * c:\vhd\snapshot.vhd
Note: Physical-to-virtual hard drive migration of a Windows installation is a valid function for customers with Software Assurance and full retail copies of Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7. Software Assurance provides users valuable benefits—please contact Microsoft Corporation for further information. Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 installed by Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM) using OEM versions of these products may not be transferred to a virtual hard drive in accordance with Microsoft licensing terms.
From: Technet.microsoft.com
Related
I have some old vm's from Azure, that was disconnect so Windows and Linux (Ubuntu I believe). I am trying the Windows first, I am having problems attaching the vm
DiskPart has encountered an error: The requested operation could not be completed due to a virtual disk system limitation. Virtual hard disk files must be uncompressed and unencrypted and must not be sparse.
See the System Event Log for more information.
no compression
I have a Linux (redhat 7.6) VM and I need to give more RAM.
actually size: standard A1_v2 (2gb RAM)
new size: A4_v2 (8gb RAM)
If I do the resize by Azure portal, is there any considerations? Or any linux configuration that I will lose?
your vm would be rebooted to perform the resize. nothing on the OS level changes (well, unless you have some changes in memory, that would not be preserved after a reboot). basically if your vm (and\or applications inside the vm) can handle the reboot - nothing will break.
I have a VM running Windows Server 2012 R2 and it is a Standards D3 VM I need to resize it to DS3_V2 VM but I can't see it in the sizing panel VM list. What I can see is bellow. What is the reason for this?
Probably, the virtual machine’s current host cluster hardware doesn’t support the new series, so it’s not listed as an option.
By deallocating the virtual machine (Azure shutdown, not a guest OS
shutdown), all of the possible options in the region are made
available, and the resize process will migrate the virtual machine to
a new computer cluster.
Get more details from this article.
Deallocating also does not gives the above options. In my case, I did deallocate it and then powered on and again deallocated again then it's showing all sizes available.
I want to install CloudStack 4.2.0 on my 32 bit ubuntu in virtual box. It is possible?
And advantages/disadvantages of this from real machine?
Thanks.
I presume that you're talking about running the Apache CloudStack management server in a 32-bit virtual machine that runs in Virtual Box.
To do anything meaningful with CloudStack, you need at least one hypervisor to control. To avoid the need for hardware, many CloudStack developers use DevCloud. DevCloud comes with configuration scripts that make it easier for a beginner to setup the Apache CloudStack management server.
One issue is memory. If the O/S running VirtualBox is 32-bit, you'll only have 3 gigs of RAM for user processes. Of this, DevCloud will use about 2 gigs, so memory can be quite tight.
Another issue is networking. Make sure that there is a network path from the management server to the hypervisors it is meant to control and the storage that it will use for templates (aka secondary storage).
Yes you can deploy apache cloudstack on a virtual machine; you can deploy even a whole cloudstack infrastructure on virtual machines provided that you have enough RAM.
You can deploy primary storage, secondary storage, mySQL server and cloudstack management server on Virtual Machines; however the host VMs which will provide the execution environment of your cloudstack instances need to provide nested virtualization which is not available in virtualbox, do use VMWare workstation instead as your type2 hypervisor .
good luck
According to wiki, VHD (Virtual Hard Disk) may contain what is found on a physical HDD, such as disk partitions and a file system, which in turn can contain files and folders.
I have found the VHD image of the WP7 in the following directory.
I read that Hyper-V features offline VHD manipulation, providing administrators with the ability to securely access files within a VHD without having to instantiate a virtual machine. The Windows Disk Management MMC plugin can directly attach a .vhd as a drive letter in Windows 7. I tried the same thing.
The result was this error.
Now, I want to know if there is anyway to mount this VHD and explore the file system ? I mean can I take this VHD to a linux environment and explore ? Is this VHD really corrupt or I lack some access privileges ?
I have tried it too, but get the same message as you get. Probably a kind of restriction Microsoft has build in to protect users from sniffing around. (Especially in the period that there where no hardware devices and only the emulator was available or periods where the updated SDK is delivered earlier than the actual update)
If there is a way too mount this VHD than they definitly know how to do it at the XDA developers forum. I think posting your question overthere will result in more/better answers than on StackOverflow which has more focus on application development.