I am running a couple ESXi 4.1 servers to have an emulated production environment. I am to take the acronis backup images from the production environment (taken with Acronis Advanced Backup and Recovery 10) and bring them up in our test environment. The machines run everything from win2k server through win2k8 R2. I spent several days getting the 2 DCs virtualized (both 2k8 R2) but was finally able to do it with some help from sanbarrow.com and alot of testing.
The procedure I have been using is to create a new virtual machine, with a similar setup to what the existing machine has (get it the right OS, proper drives and sizes, etc.) I add 2 cd drives and mount one with the Acronis bootable CD, and another with an ISO of the .TIB images. I basically treat the virtual environment as physical and do the traditional Acronis restoration inside the VM. I settled on this method after trying the VM converter and it constantly not recoginizing the source format (i was unable to convert any .TIB images)
Ive been able to get the 2 2k8R2 DCs, and 1 XP client machine virtualized, and every one of the 20 or so I have left go through this process, and then blue screen with the 0x0000007B INNACCESSABLE_BOOT_DEVICE error. Ive gone in and checked the boot.ini file and it seems to be pointing at the proper location, ive tried them with all 3 controller types and get similar errors. Considering its happening on almost all of them, the only thing I could think it would be is a driver issue. These are fairly standard machines, mostly Dell workstations and a few Dell servers. I cannot install/modify/change anything on the production environment, so I just have the images to work with. Ive read through http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?cmd=displayKC&externalId=1005208 this about injecting SCSI drivers into the setup but that requires changing the machine and getting new images. Im wondering; since I can browse through the image, can i get in and add or remove a driver from there to help the process? Ive also looked through http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?cmd=displayKC&externalId=1006626 to make sure im not running anything that would foul it up. The only software I can think of that may is 'Diskkeeper' which is a defragmentation/optimization software that we run on most of our production machines, but im not sure that it manages the disks below the OS level.
Any suggestions would be MUCH appreciated, im working under alot of restrictions and its making this difficult!
I didnt attach .vmx files since there were so many machines but I can as needed.