Cloning Windows Server 2003R2 System Disk

I have a situation that requires to clone a system disk on a Windows SBS 2003 system since the C: drive is running out of space. The issue is that the SBS server is down to about 1.5MB of free disk space (don’t ask how that happened…it’s not pretty) and, while the physical disk is 80GB in overall size, the system partition is only 10GB overall. The only real solution is to clone the system partition to a new disk, then boot the machine with the new disk as a slave and use diskpart to extend the partition. Then, after that’s done, change the jumpers on the two drives so that the new clone is the master drive and the original becomes the slave and boot the machine off the new clone drive. Simple.

I ended up choosing to use Clonezilla since it appeared to be more mature than g4u (whether this is true or not I cannot say for sure…nevertheless, they both appear to do the job). I found it by searching for “open source disk clone” and stumbled across the OSALT site. After downloading the ISO I went into my VM lab (a HP DL380 G3 running VMWare ESXi 3.5) and created a new VM consisting of the same hardware as the source except for a 25GB disk versus a 10GB disk.

I then attached the new 25GB disk to the source system (my Windows Server 2003R2 domain controller for the lab), started the VM, attached the ISO via the VMWare Infrastructure client and booted off the ISO/CD. After about 5 minutes Clonezilla came up and I setup the cloning process — all in all about 10 minutes worth of work at most. I then fired up the cloning process and after an additional 45 minutes the clone was done. The clone was still 10GB large as I didn’t explore whether Clonezilla could resize the partition on the fly while it was cloning it. No big deal…it’s easy to extend the partition under Windows if you have the space on your drive. I rebooted into the Windows OS (with the clone disk still attached) and I resized the partition using diskpart. Once that was completed I shutdown the VM, detached the cloned disk from the source and booted the new VM. After a complaint from Windows Product Activation that the system hardware had substantially changed and having to go through the reactivation process again I had a domain controller with more than double the disk space of the original system.

The next step is to do this to the SBS system.

VMware Server 2.0 — Finally!

Well, VMware put Server 2.0 (the final release) out at the end of October and I have to see…it looks really good. I haven’t had a chance to compare it to Server 2008 Hyper-V yet (as I need to finish building my Hyper-V box first) however I have to say that between Server 2.0 and VMware ESXi 3.5 update 2 VMware has some very nice virtualization products out on the market. Let’s cover Server 2.0 first before we get into ESXi 3.5. Here’s the specs for the Server 2.0 system:

• HP Proliant DL380
• Dual 3.06GHz Xeon CPUs
• Dual 10/100MB interfaces
• 6 x 36GB 10,000 RPM SCSI disks w/hardware RAID-5
• 12GB memory
• O/S: Ubuntu Server 8.04LTS

Previously I was running VMware Server 1.0.6 on this system but now that VMware has released Server 2.0 I wanted to take another look at it. While the download is big (570MB) it certainly is not too bad and the install went flawlessly. The Server 2.0 detected the 1.0.6 software on the machine, uninstalled it (but kept the settings) and then installed Server 2.0 and configured it using the settings from the 1.0.6 version. All in all, within about 10 minutes I was back up and running. I like the look of the new interface as well — reminds me very much of the clean look of ESXi…and the best part is that it runs in IE8 Beta 2 (well, almost). To login I simply point the browser to the host system port 8333 as shown.

Login page to VMware 2.0

Once you login the amount of information at your fingertips is great.

VMware 2.0 summary page

Selecting a specific machine also gives you an immense amount of detail

Machine information in VMware Server 2.0

You can start machines directly from the summary page or you can start them from the console tab by clicking on the big white arrow

Starting a new VM image

Here’s where IE8 was a bit problematic (and I’m not sure it was IE8 or if it’s also an issue with IE7…I’ll have to test this). I had to do two things to get the console to work under Vista/IE8 Beta 2. First, I had to add the VMware server system into IE’s trusted site list. Second, I also had to be running in compatibility mode. Finally, once those two items were done I was able to install the VMRC plugin and get it to work. I still haven’t tried this under Firefox 3.0 yet and will try that later. Once the machine starts you click in the console window (or at one of the two squares in the console tab in the VMware shown below)

Console options in the Console tab

The option on the left opens up a new VMRC window as a separate window. The box on the right opens the VMRC in full screen mode (which you can then reduce to a regular sized window). Not sure what the benefit of the two options are but it’s there if you need it. Once the machine starts up you can have multiple VMRC windows running just like you have with ESXi.

VM console - Server 2008

VMware Server 2.0 Multiple VMRC windows

All in all, I’m quite impressed with VMware Server 2.0. I plan on playing with it for quite a while and will consider whether I will migrate this host server over to VMware ESXi 3.5. Given the small footprint of ESXi (both in terms of disk as well as memory) it may well be the way to go in the long run. I’ll review my ESXi experience in an upcoming post as well as my Hyper-V experience as well.

New VM System

Well…I managed to get a hold of an HP DL380 G3 with dual 3.06GHz Xeon processors, 2GB of RAM, and 6 36GB hard drives with a RAID 5 controller for very little cost. This has accelerated my move towards virtualizing all of my systems at home. In the process of doing so I have also decided that I’m going to upgrade my domain controllers to Server 2008 Standard.

First off I’m using as a base OS on the DL380 Ubuntu 8.04 with VMware Server 1.0.6. The reason being is that I can’t install Server 2008 with Hyper-V on the DL380 G3 — it’s only supported on the DL380 G5 (which has the Intel procs with VT). So, given that I decided to go with Ubuntu and VMware. The install of Ubuntu went easy enough and VMware was just slightly more complicated. I used the instructions here to get the VMware MUI working properly (or course, now it’s not working properly and I’ve got to figure out why).

Anyway, now that I’ve gotten VMware installed and configured I have installed two VM guests — Server 2008 Standard and Server 2008 Core Standard. I’m using both network interfaces on the machine — one for connecting to the VM host system and the other is a bridged interface for the VM guests. I configured the Server 2008 Core system’s network settings according to Dan Petri’s instructions here. In addition I enabled NetBIOS over TCP/IP using the wmic command utility. The instructions for doing that are here.

Finally, once the VMware Tools were installed on the Server 2008 Core system I had to change the display resolution. Turns out, when you install the VMware Tools on Server 2008 Core the display resolution goes from 800×600 to 640×480 (which is really annoying – see the following picture).

Server 2008 Core After VMware Tools Install

Changing that is not so simple though as it requires that you modify the registry. You need to find the right registry setting. The video settings can be found in HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Video\ where is the ID for the video card and driver currently being used. Look for the Device Description registry key (it should be VMware SVGA II). Right above it are the DefaultSettings.XResolution and the DefaultSettings.YResolution registry key. They are both DWORDs and can be input either in hexadecimal or decimal (see below)

Server 2008 Core Registry Settings for Display Resolution

I changed the values in both registry keys to 1024 and 768 respectively and then restarted the VM (using the command shutdown /r /t 0). The final result is shown below.

Server 2008 Core with 1024x768 Display Resolution

Now I need to finish migrating the rest of my VM images off the old VALinux FullOn 2240 and onto the new system. The only things I need to do to the DL380 is increase the RAM from 2GB to 12GB and buy a cabinet for it…man is it loud…I forgot just how loud the DL380s are.