Transition WHS 2011 to VMWare

[Geofram]

Hey everyone,

Looking for a bit of help from someone experienced at using VMWare.

Currently I've got two servers at home. One of them is a domain controller that does some other basic stuff - this is currently installed as a virtual machine on a computer running VMWare. My second computer is running WHS 2011 without any virtualization.

The WHS server has 5 HDDs; each is between 1TB and 2TB in size. All of them are being used to one degree or another; most aren't more than half full.

I'm looking to consolidate my servers, since neither is doing anything too hard. It wasn't difficult to move the DC to a VM, since it didn't have any secondary hard drives. I just did a backup -> restore to the new VM. However, I'm not sure how to go about moving WHS (with it's 5 HDDs) over without losing anything. I'd prefer not to have to reinstall WHS, since I like the configuration I have now - custom folders, users created with proper passwords, etc.

So how would you go about doing it? Do the OS first, and then transition drives one at a time? I assume I'd have to add the HDDs to the drive pool in VMWare, and then create virtual HDDs to be added to the WHS install. Is there a better way to move all of the drives over without going through a lot of work?

 

[WobbleWobble]

An easy thing to do would be to use Hyper-V, put WHS as a guest OS and attach the raw disks. You can't do raw disk mapping with a regular SATA setup in ESX and XenServer.

 

[Viper GTS]

You could also pass a PCI disk controller into a VM if you have appropriate hardware that supports VMdirectPath IO.

Viper GTS

 

[Geofram]

An easy thing to do would be to use Hyper-V, put WHS as a guest OS and attach the raw disks. You can't do raw disk mapping with a regular SATA setup in ESX and XenServer.

I've considered this; I even played around with it for a while. But I had 2 issues with it.

1) If I reboot the domain controller for updates(which I assume if where you'd have Hyper-V) I don't want the VMs to go down.

2) If I don't have Hyper-V inside of the DC, and install it stand-alone (with the DC as another virtual machine under it) I have weird issues authenticating with it. It's bad to join the host OS to the DC in a case like that, and that lead to all kind of strange issues being able to connect to it to manage it.

I settled on using VMWare now because it's so popular, and I figured I'd try to learn how it works.

You could also pass a PCI disk controller into a VM if you have appropriate hardware that supports VMdirectPath IO.

I don't believe I have the proper hardware for this right now. It's all running on an old AMD X2 quad-core right now. Everything will be hooked up directly to the motherboard's SATA ports. This might change in a few months (I'm planning on getting "server" hardware to run this all on eventually. If I need to wait until then to do it, I might hold out.