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Standby VM of a VM

Corrigun
over 6 years ago

We currently export of one of our physical servers as a standby VM to a DR site. I am thinking of migrating that physical server to virtual by just waiting for a scheduled snapshot, turning off the physical server and turning on the standby VM.

After I do will I be able to simply point the scheduled standby export to a new hypervisor,  let it export a new base and continue on. Basically making a standby VM of a VM instead of a physical.

This machine is running a DB application on 2008r2 and is not a DC.

Any input is appreciated.

  • 0 over 6 years ago
    Here's how I would do it:
    1. Force snapshot on physical server
    2. Wait for snapshot to complete. Once complete, power off physical server.
    3. Wait for virtual standby export of the most recent backup to complete. Once complete, pause virtual standby for that machine.
    4. Power on virtual machine. Confirm all services and functions are working as expected. Hopefully you can manually assign it the same IP that the physical server had so that networking is simple.
    5. Run the protect wizard to protect virtual machine with core. This must be done in order for backups of the VM to occur.
    6. Delete old virtual standby configuration. (You can't edit and change the host destination)
    7. Create new virtual standby configuration pointing to a different host.

    There will be a little downtime with this process, but it shouldn't be too bad.
  • 0 over 6 years ago
    I put in a support request and they suggested that if the physical machine has an agent on it then the conversion to virtual would not effect the backup routine and it may not even take a new base image if I was lucky.

    They did agree with the rest of it exactly as you stated. I'll report back with the results in a day or two when I am done.
  • 0 over 6 years ago
    It was a complete disaster. After an hour I had to go back to the physical machine.

    The exported VM was completely unstable. Server manager and control panel would not open. Out of memory errors. Permission errors. Even from the first few boots when I installed the services disk it never really acted right ( mouse cursor trails, small window, etc).

    My guess is that the last snapshot was hosed somehow? I guess I should force a whole new machine and try again?
  • 0 over 6 years ago
    What's the OS and patch level of the machine you exported? What hypervisor are you using?
  • 0 over 6 years ago

    The exported VM is 2008r2. The Hypervisor is HyperV on 2012r2.

    It's probably worth noting that I have previously exported this machine to another HyperV machine also running 2012r2 and it seems to run fine. Although it never went "live" it did not act oddly like this one did.