Capture and VM'ing several Win 7/10 systems.

Journey · 1 Jul 2019 at 22:34

I've been requested to help out a friend with an I.T. upgrade, which is fine, but it is for 15+ systems in his office. The machines are already configured, but due to the way the current systems and users have their systems setup there is local data and programs that will need to be accessed for a good while after the new ones are all setup.

What would you recommend for doing a live capture, or at least a last boot capture and then converting that image to a virtual for so many systems, to be used in the Windows 10 environment afterwards. I'm a hardware guy by trade, and as such I normally just use something like Macrium if it is one system, or if I'm working I have a PXE DISM server that I boot to and image from that.

Want to make it a simple as possible to speed things up since I'll be doing this at a weekend, and don't want to make the users suffer having me visit in the working week.

bremen1874 · 1 Jul 2019 at 22:38

Can't you leave the old boxes running? They could be left headless and accessed via RDP.

Journey · 1 Jul 2019 at 22:40

bremen1874 said:
Can't you leave the old boxes running? They could be left headless and accessed via RDP.

Not a chance, not enough space/plugs and that would also require way more network ports adding.

Stephanie Peterson · 1 Jul 2019 at 23:03

Whats the software?
90% of windows stuff is behaved and dumps them in specific parts of the user profile, i would copy the contents out 1 by 1 to home drivers on the server (i am assuming going server/client route)

Quartz · 1 Jul 2019 at 23:21

Set up VMs on the users' new PCs.

Journey · 1 Jul 2019 at 23:24

Stephanie Peterson said:
Whats the software?
90% of windows stuff is behaved and dumps them in specific parts of the user profile, i would copy the contents out 1 by 1 to home drivers on the server (i am assuming going server/client route)

Sadly it is not that simple, the systems have never been networked before other then a few shares from a file server, so they are all stand alone containing the software and data for each user. The new system is a properly configured network, so once the transition is complete the VMs will be archived.

Quartz · 1 Jul 2019 at 23:25

All user data should, of course, go on the servers.

Journey · 1 Jul 2019 at 23:26

Quartz said:
Set up VMs on the users' new PCs.

Lol, that is what I am asking... They are each going to be able to access the old system as a VM, I wasn't to know the simplest way to capture many systems and make the image files into VM's.

Quartz · 1 Jul 2019 at 23:32

Journey said:
Lol, that is what I am asking...

Ah right, it wasn't clear if you wanted that or the VMs to be on a central server.

Stephanie Peterson · 1 Jul 2019 at 23:55

Journey said:
Sadly it is not that simple, the systems have never been networked before other then a few shares from a file server, so they are all stand alone containing the software and data for each user. The new system is a properly configured network, so once the transition is complete the VMs will be archived.

That doesnt matter, for the last god knows how many years windows has stored most of its data in user profiles on the computer - its unlikely the apps have spaffed it all over the place. It will all be in the user profile they log into on the desktop.

What version of windows are these machines, the old ones, and what software.
All this idea of copying to a VM is not the way to go about it, your making life 1000x difficult for yourself.

Journey · 2 Jul 2019 at 00:04

Stephanie Peterson said:
That doesnt matter, for the last god knows how many years windows has stored most of its data in user profiles on the computer - its unlikely the apps have spaffed it all over the place. It will all be in the user profile they log into on the desktop.

What version of windows are these machines, the old ones, and what software.
All this idea of copying to a VM is not the way to go about it, your making life 1000x difficult for yourself.

I appreciate you trying to help, but I think you are being a bit over the top.

The business wants to keep the systems as an image and a VM, for several reasons, one of those includes that some of the old software isn't being relicensed for the new systems, and they need to be able to access the old systems for a short period of time to ensure a smooth change over.

If this continues, I'll just image then manually and convert them to VDi and use Virtual box.

brendy · 2 Jul 2019 at 00:19

Disk2vhd should do the job, I've used it many times to retain old sage/app machines but allows me to bin the actual ancient hardware. The worst case is it faffs partitions but using Aomei software to delete the unnecessary stuff. Not had one fail yet.

Quartz · 2 Jul 2019 at 00:26

Stephanie Peterson said:
It will all be in the user profile they log into on the desktop.

Don't forget the \ProgramData directory structure

Cromulent · 2 Jul 2019 at 02:57

I don't know what virtualisation software you are planning on using, but if you get VMWare Workstation Pro 15, there is an option to create a virtual machine from a physical computer. You can then save that virtual machine as an OVF file and then import it into any virtualisation software that supports that open standard.

Once you have virtualised all of the physical systems, you should be able to decommission them all and do a test over the weekend to make sure that everything is working as intended. I'd also recommend that you take a full system image using whatever backup software you provide in case something goes wrong.

Rroff · 2 Jul 2019 at 04:04

brendy said:
Disk2vhd should do the job, I've used it many times to retain old sage/app machines but allows me to bin the actual ancient hardware. The worst case is it faffs partitions but using Aomei software to delete the unnecessary stuff. Not had one fail yet.

This - done it a few times and so far been 99% trouble free booting them in VirtualBox.

edscdk · 2 Jul 2019 at 06:20

Ive done this serveral times I image the physical to a usb drive or server using acronis, then boot a blank vm from the acronis recovery media and recover the image to the vm, I use esxi free or vmware workstation.

15 vms unless you hate the staff you will want and 8 Core new cpu (assuming they don't do much taxing work) and 64gb ram.. Windows takes all spare ram so it uses more than you expect. You will also want some ssds.

Id clean up the disks before starting empty restore point s and limit sizes. Shrink page files, clear temp and old patches.

I'm assuming the vms will be all used all the time if they are emergency backups then you could use less ram and/cpu/slow disks.

What's the budget? You could buy a pile of used usdt pc's and use them headless in the corner with a extra switch for £900 or you will be spending a few k on a server and risking major outage (as I assume you don't want the expense of a spare and shared storage)..

It would probably be better to put the old vm on the new pc using virtual box (or vmware workstation free).. But still clean up the old physicals

Armageus · 2 Jul 2019 at 06:38

Have used both disk2vhd and VMware converter to great effect in the past.

Journey · 2 Jul 2019 at 07:53

brendy said:
Disk2vhd should do the job, I've used it many times to retain old sage/app machines but allows me to bin the actual ancient hardware. The worst case is it faffs partitions but using Aomei software to delete the unnecessary stuff. Not had one fail yet.

Thanks, that is exactly what I was looking for.

Armageus said:
Have used both disk2vhd and VMware converter to great effect in the past.

Good to hear it, thanks.

edscdk said:
It would probably be better to put the old vm on the new pc using virtual box (or vmware workstation free).. But still clean up the old physicals

Each user will have access to their old PC, on their new one, that was the plan when doing this as all but two of the users have different software requirements. As for the machine specs they range from Xeon workstations with 256GB RAM, to i7 9700's, all the way down to basic i3's with 16GB, however every machine is specced with at least a SATA SSD!

wesley · 10 Jul 2019 at 07:51

Journey said:
Thanks, however every machine is specced with at least a SATA SSD!

That's what we've been telling my bosses to have the new PC's with SSD. He simply won't listening us. Soon we will have 300+ new PC's with rubbish 1TB hard drive! We only need 120GB SSD, cheaper than 1TB hard drive! He thinks the bigger the hard drive the quicker it'll be lol

Journey · 10 Jul 2019 at 07:56

wesley said:
That's what we've been telling my bosses to have the new PC's with SSD. He simply won't listening us. Soon we will have 300+ new PC's with rubbish 1TB hard drive! We only need 120GB SSD, cheaper than 1TB hard drive! He thinks the bigger the hard drive the quicker it'll be lol

Gotta love people who pay for the tech not having a clue about it.

Well the transition went smoothly, other than a hiccup on a single machine that had a faulty hard drive that went undetected for weeks/months/years, thanks to anyone who helped.

Sadly such a good job was done, I got an invite to help out with an expansion at a later date, DOH!