Physical to Virtual (P2V) image-based restores of Windows clients

With bare metal backups, you can use your UEB or Unitrends Recovery-Series appliance to create a VMware or Hyper-V virtual machine instance of a physical server. You will need a bare metal .iso file created with the Unitrends Bare Metal Media tool, and a bare metal backup of the server you want to restore. Note that if you’re performing the P2V operation as a test and the server you’re restoring is currently online, you will need to change the network settings in the Client Settings section of the Bare Metal Media tool to an available IP address. If you are restoring a domain controller to a Hyper-V VM, see Special consideration for Domain Controllers on Hyper-V after completing the restore.

To perform a P2V image-based restore

1        If performing the restore as a test, first see Considerations for bare metal test restores.

2        Make sure the IP in the hosts file of the Unitrends system matches what was entered in the Client Settings section of the Bare Metal Media tool. To edit the hosts file, on the Backup system navigate to Settings > Clients, Networks, and Notifications > Networks > Hosts, select your client in the list, type in its new IP, and click Confirm.

3        Create your virtual machine.

     Do not install an OS on the VM.

     Add at least 2 GB of memory, or more if preferred.

     Give the virtual hard drive at least as much space as was available on the physical server. If you give it less space, the restore will fail.

     Make sure you’re using the E1000 NIC for VMware, or the Legacy NIC for
Hyper-V. For Hyper-V, this may require removing the existing network adapter and adding the legacy. For details, see To configure the Hyper-V VM to use the legacy network adapter.

     Add your bare metal .iso to the VM’s disk drive.

4        Boot the VM from the bare metal .iso.

5        Once the bare metal screen comes up, select Bare Metal Restore.

6        A list of your bare metal backups appears at the top of the screen. Select the one you would like to use for your restore and click Start Restore.

7        On this screen, click Add to tell the Unitrends system to restore your bare metal backup to the virtual hard drive you created in Step 3. Click OK.

8        The option to view real-time statistics appears in a dialog box. Monitor the status of the restore on the Bare Metal Statistics screen, or from the Unitrends Administrator Interface at Settings > System Monitoring > Jobs.

9        Once the restore is complete, inject the networking driver.

10    Click OK and then Exit to take you back to the Windows Bare Metal Restore screen.

11    Click Rescan Disk to scan for newly created partitions and volumes

12    Click Inject Offline Driver.

13    Select your OS volume under Disk information and click either ESX Guest Storage Driver or HyperV or Xen Guest Storage Driver.

14    Click Cancel to close windows until you’re back to the Windows Bare Metal menu.

15    Click Diagnostic Tools and Reboot to reboot your system.

16    At this point the Windows boot volume (usually C:) has been restored. Create and format additional volumes as necessary.

Important! If file-level backups of the original Windows client contain files from volumes outside of the Windows boot volume, you must create and format those additional volumes. File-level restore will fail if these additional volumes do not exist.

17    Perform file-level recovery to restore your machine to its latest backup. See Executing a point-in-time restore for details.

Note for Exchange servers: If you are unable to mount Exchange databases after performing the restore, the databases may be in a Dirty Shutdown state. See this Microsoft article for details: Exchange Database is in a Dirty Shutdown State.