Getting ready to P2V a couple file servers. OS is C: and all file shares are on D:, E:, etc. Our plan is to end up with the file share drives on their own Volumes on our ISCSI SAN and use the ISCSI connector on the VM guest over it's own VNIC. This is the way we do it now with Virtual SQL servers and it works great. The only virtual disks will be the OS boot drive. My reasoning for this is because it's a whole lot easier/quicker for me to mount a snap shot of the volume via ISCSI to recover data than it would be to attach a snapshot of a virtual disk to a VM to recover. That's my reasoning unless someone would like to shoot holes it for me, and yes if I had NFS I would use it but I don't.
My question is the procedure for migrating the file share data. There's about a dozen different ways I could do it. But no matter if I set up a new server and migrate the data with FSMT or P2V the entire server I still have to get all the file shares and files and folders with their security in tact from what the server would consider one physical drive to another. I would prefer to set up a new server so I could go from a 2003 to 2008R2 at the same time. I thinking the easiest way would be to set up the new VM server, move the data and shares with the file server migration toolkit and then just rename the servers. And probably swap IP's just for the heck of it. I know DFS would take care of not having to rename the servers but I'm just trying to keep it simple and my knowledge of DFS is very lacking. ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
