Migrate windows xp to windows 2008 server

migrationwindows-server-2008windows-xp

What I'm going to ask here is very difficult for system analyst's like me to do and is generally done by experts.

In my office, I'm running windows xp as a server(ofcourse it's a client os). It has many applications installed and has the partitions of 50GB, 80GB and 177GB sizes of data. I'm asked to migrate xp system to windows 2008 server.

The following things should be migrated from xp to 2008 server:

  • Installed applications: As far as I know I'll be installing each and every application one by one. Wondering is there any other way I could do this easily.

  • File & Folders: I should move all the files and folders of each partition(even from active partition). In linux(ubuntu) I used the partition cloning commands like 'dd' and 'ddrescue' which easily cloned the entire partition without any risk. Here I don't know but to copy & paste.

Here the major problem for me compared to above two.

  • I have sun virtualbox installed on xp and 3 ubuntu virutal machines running on it and these three machines are actually used as servers.
    This is typical one and I don't know how I'am going to do this. Each virtual machines has atleast 10 snapshots and moving these to the new one…? I have no hope. Here I'll be left with flood of errors and it's for sure.

Dear experts, please guide me to accomplish this.

Best Answer

Outline your Move :
Download these tools they might help (you can google them) :
**Symantec BESR 2010** (Evaluation version - Fully functional - 60Days)
**Disk2VHD** - Sysinternals (Converts running machines (xp, 2k3, 2k8, 2k8r2, w7, vista to a VHD file which can be used in Hyper-V).
Delete unwanted Snapshots (ofcourse after verifying that the current state is working as requierd) https://superuser.com/questions/152729/how-do-virtualbox-snapshots-work

Q : What do you have on your Ubuntu VMs ?
Q : Do you have any other applications on your XP machine other then these VMs ?
Q : What is the new Server Hardware ?
Q : What is the future growth expectations ? Users, Server Load ?
Q : How many users are there in your enviornment?
Q : What are you using these VMs for - What applications ?

Power down your Ubuntu VMs (after deleting / merging snapshots saves disk space), then Export those Ubuntu VMs in ovf format. via VBOX File Menu > Export Appliance.

You can convert your running xp machine into a vhd file (minus your ubuntu vms) and you can use that vhd in Hyper-V at a later stage.

Related Topic