Forum Discussion

prs246191's avatar
prs246191
Level 5
10 years ago

Backup to VMWare Workstation 8

Is it possible to take a backup of a physical server that I have in my production environment and restore it to a vm, enabling me to make a lab (test) Enviroment?  I am running BE 2012 with all of th...
Backing Up
Backup and Recovery
Backup Exec
Virtualization
Windows Server (2003-2008)
  • pkh's avatar
    pkh
    10 years ago

    You cannot simply recover your server in a VM or any other physical machine for that matter.  It would probably fail to boot due to incompatible or missing drivers.

    What you can do is to use SDR to restore the server to either a VM or another physical machine.  SDR will allow you to install the necessary drivers during the restore so that the restored machine is functioning machine.  For more details on SDR, read the SDR chapter in the Admin Guide.  There is also a video on SDR recovery in the Video section.

    If you have a physical Hyper-V host which is licenced for the Hyper-V agent licence, then you do a B2V restore of your physical machine to a Hyper-V VM.  For more details, read the Hyper-V chapter in the Admin Guide.

    As previously advised, VMware Workstation is not supported.

CraigV's avatar
CraigV
Moderator
10 years ago

hI,

 

Probably only on a file level if you do the following:

1. Backup everything on the physical server.

2. Create a VM in VMware Workstation 8, and load the BE Remote Agent on it.

3. Restore all the files from backup to this newly created VM.

Other than that, there is no way to do a P2V of the physical server onto Workstation as there is no support for it in Backup Exec.

Thanks!