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I've got an aging SBS 2003 server with raid 1 IDE drives and I want to take an image of the drive that I can use in a virtualbox VM.

Is this possible - and what software is recommended for taking an image from the SBS 2003 drive?

The VM host machine will be a Win7 x64 system.

I need to keep the SBS 2003 machine online as it provides a service that we can't move to a replacement server.

billy.orange
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  • Why Virtualbox and not something meant for a production environment like Hyper-V? – MDMarra Dec 30 '13 at 15:21
  • I'm familiar with virtualbox and may also consider a linux VM host. – billy.orange Dec 30 '13 at 15:23
  • Is your intent to decommission the physical server? – joeqwerty Dec 30 '13 at 15:30
  • yes, I'm worried that the disks might fail, the hardware is old. I don't want to have to deal with hardware failure, I'd rather move before that happens! – billy.orange Dec 30 '13 at 15:43
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    OK, then do yourself a favor and put the converted VM on a proper hypervisor. You can run the free editions of either Hyper-V or vSphere if licensing costs are an issue. For Hyper-V you can use Disk2VHD to convert the physical server and for vSphere you can use the VMware vCenter Converter Standalone. - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/ee656415.aspx - https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/info/slug/infrastructure_operations_management/vmware_vcenter_converter_standalone/5_0 – joeqwerty Dec 30 '13 at 15:50
  • great answer, thanks. I'm not familiar with a proper hypervisor - what are the advantages? does it offer direct hardware access to the client?# – billy.orange Dec 30 '13 at 15:51
  • @billy.orange - I'd second what joeqwerty said-- running this old server on Hyper-V or a VMware hypervisor is going to give you the best possible experience because your configuration will be something more mainstream than VirtualBox. More people have run Windows Server 2003 on Hyper-V and VMware hypervisors than on VirtualBox, and the conversion tools are better. Having said that, though, given that Microsoft isn't going to support Windows Small Business Server 2003 very soon anyway using a Microsoft-supported hypervisor isn't really a concern from a support perspective. – Evan Anderson Jan 01 '14 at 06:50

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I wrote a tutorial for this, http://www.linuxintro.org/wiki/Virtualize_your_computer

basically you boot your computer from a Live CD like Knoppix, then create a disk dump onto a USB disk (or you transmit it via the network), then you convert this image into a VMware VMDK (or any other format) using qemu-img

Thorsten Staerk
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  • I happen to have linux mint on a USB stick - but it's an 8gb stick and the server is old. I'm not sure its BIOS will support booting from a USB stick (or even the CD ROM drive!) But good answer, I'll definitely consider this solution, thanks! – billy.orange Dec 30 '13 at 15:49
  • oh, and I can't upvote until I get 15 reputation, so I will remember to come back and +1 your answer :) – billy.orange Dec 30 '13 at 15:49
  • yeah, usually :) – billy.orange Dec 30 '13 at 15:50
  • I was a bit enthusiastic and realize now I wrote this tutorial especially for VMware. But I just checked, qemu-img does support VDI as format. – Thorsten Staerk Dec 30 '13 at 15:52