Ghost Solution Suite

Hi,
 

We have some servers running hyper-v however the previous administrator took wayyy too many snapshots on the hyper-v and i do not know if some of them might be corrupted.
We are also trying to migrate it to a failover cluster but there's just too many AVHD files to merge.

the virtual machine is still running, worst in production.(so it hasn't been shutdown for years for the AVHD to merge)

i thought of a solution which is to clone out the VM.. probably faster than waiting for the snapshots to merge or maually trying to find and merge the VHD with snapshots...

Recreate the virutal machine(a new VHD) on the failover cluster manager and restore back to the new VM .

The question are these.

Will ghost 11.5 be able to clone VM running in hyper-v hypervisor?
Will ghosts 11.5 be able and restore the cloned VM back into the hyper-v hypervisor?

Note:
Server is running windows server 2008R2
Services : IIS , MS SQL.

We will be able to shutdown the server for cloning

Time is crucial as server is in production.

.

I think you should wait until Ghost 3.0 is released as the Ghost 2.51 product features a version of WinPE based on the Vista kernel, and one thing that is pretty much universal is the lack of 32 bit Vista drivers for server platforms.

You might want to check out this article however:

https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/articles/creating-and-using-winpe31-image-gss-251

as this gives Ghost 2.51 users a way to upgrade the version of WinPE to version 3, based on the Win 7 kernel  (which should also work with the server 2008 drivers).

You will need to ensure you have the correct disk array drivers for WinPE and can access the volume correctly before you try ghosting.

Note also that Ghost 2.51 does not work with UEFI bioses so you will need to turn this off. If you have maintenance on Ghost, you can get the latest binaries from support which do work with UEFI bioses.