Drew Wutka
DWUTKA at Marlow.com
Thu Nov 1 12:24:23 CDT 2007
We recently bought a backup/restore system called Acronis. Great software package. (Bought a server with a few terabytes of drive space too). Anywho, Acronis has a rather unique restore process. With a Windows 9x system, you could take a hard drive out of one machine, and put it in another with completely different hardware, and after a gazillion 'found new hardware' prompts, you'd eventually load Windows again on the new machine. Windows NT and 2000 were no where near as friendly with new hardware. Acronis does a 'true image' restore, however, that lets you restore a system on a completely different machine. Pretty slick, and works about 95% of the time. Virtual PC has been mentioned on this list before too. It's a PC emulator. You can install all sorts of OSes on virtual hard drives (which are just files on your real hard drives, though you can setup a real hard drive as a 'virtual' hard drive in VPC). This post is about something I've been doing the last few weeks, which I think is just plain cool. If you use these two software packages, you can pretty easily create Virtual PCs from live machines. Two examples: Our Intranet died about a month ago. One of the hard drives crashed. It was in a RAID, but the only machine that had the same sized drives was my desktop. (80 gig SCSI drives). So we cannibalized my desktop to bring the Intranet back up. We then bought a new machine for the Intranet. (current machine was a glorified desktop, new machine an actual rack server). The old Intranet was Windows 2000 Server (on a PIII 1ghz processor with 768 megs of RAM, a mirrored OS volume, and a RAID 5 data volume), new machine Windows 2003 Server (a few gigs of ram, and I think a Xeon processor). Anywho, there's no easy way to 'move' an IIS 5.0 'web' to an IIS 6.0 web (though in IIS 6 you can now save a website to a file to restore...that's nice...now.). So I manually moved our Intranet to the new machine. Didn't mind doing it that way, since over the years, our Intranet has a lot of unused stuff on it, so I just moved what was being used...... But, now I want my hard drives back (especially since I talked my boss into letting me 'build' a new machine for my desktop). But I don't want to just scrap the old web. VPC and Acronis to the rescue. Ran Acronis to backup the Intranet's drives/system state. Created two VPC drives. Booted the VPC environment with an Acronis bootable CD, whalla, I now have our old Intranet server running in a virtual environment! Worked like a charm (though, admittedly, this particular restore was the first and only one that didn't boot right from the get go, had to do a Windows 2000 repair...thus the 95% comment). With this Virtual PC environment, I can do EVERYTHING I could do with the old system, hit it with Remote Administrator, hit the old Intranet with my web browser, computer management, hit the drives remotely, etc. It's just like the old Intranet is still there, but in reality, it's running in a VPC environment on my 'newly rebuilt' desktop. The second example is with Goldmine (a contact/customer management) software package. We bought a new version about 3 years ago (which means it's an older version now). Our account managers are still not using it, and one of their claims is that all their contacts are in Outlook. So I spent a week or two combining everyone's Outlook contacts (lots of fun), and now I want to import it into Goldmine. But who wants to do a huge data import on a live system? Sure, it's SQL Server based, so I could back it up, do the import, and restore it if something goofs...but all of that could be down time for a live system. (In this particular case, I don't think anyone is using it, but that's besides the point). Once again, VPC and Acronis to the rescue. Did a backup of the live Goldmine server. Created a VPC environment and restored Goldmine too it. This one was a little trickier from a setup standpoint. With the Intranet situation, the new server was MINET2003, and the old server was MINET. When I had moved everything over, we renamed the old machine MinetOLD, and the new machine to MINET. So when I created the virtual environment, I just took the physical minetOld offline. But with Goldmine, I wanted to created a 'duplicate' server. Can't have two machines with the same name on the same domain. So, to accomplish this, I 'disabled' the network card of the virtual goldmine, switched it to a workgroup (to take it off the domain), renamed it, then enabled the NIC, and joined the domain again...and for the Goldmine software, there was one .ini file (on the virtual server) to get the clients to see the new virtual server. Now I have a duplicate server on the network, that I can completely destroy if I want. And to bring it back to the original state, I have two files (about 5 gigs total), that I just copy and boot up to again. Now, I know with using an .mdb as a data source, you can copy and 'restore' a database without all this mumbo jumbo. However, I know a lot of you are working with SQL Server and Oracle backends. Some are using web interfaces. All of these 'servers' can take time to backup and restore, especially when you are just playing around to see what affects what. This software combo can really be a huge time saver! 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