[Note:  As of 4/25/2007 The procedures in this entry were found to be incorrect, and are NOT suitable for a domain controller P2V conversion.  Please read only if you are bored.]

Some time ago, we attempted a Physical-to-Virtual conversion on our domain controller with no luck (seems the SYSVOL tree doesn’t make it through the process).  Since then we’ve brought another DC online, so I’ve been itching to give this another try.

This past Tuesday was a scheduled work night for me, so I decided to see if we could make this work.

Before I started the VMware converter program, I made a backup of the System State of the DC (still in its physical form), that way we would have a copy of Active Directory, SYSVOL, all our active policies, etc. 

After the backup was complete, I went to the VM Host machine that the Domain Controller would live on and started the P2V using VMware Converter.  After an hour or so, the conversion was done and I had an image of the domain controller sitting on the host machine.

After shutting down the physical version of the domain controller, made the proper setting changes for the VM (brought the memory allocation down and disconnected the floppy and CDROM drives), held by breath, and clicked “Start.”

The machine seemed to start up ok, but soon I started to see notices that “services have failed during startup.”  A peek into the event log revealed the problem:  The VM didn’t have a static IP address like it was supposed to.  DOH!  During the conversion process, the physical network card goes away, and with it goes your TCP/IP settings.  After adjusting the network settings and rebooting, things smoothed out quite a bit.

However, a look at the File Replication events showed that things were still not cool.  The SYSVOL tree was missing and therefore replication was not happening.

Ok..reboot again…this time I booted into Directory Services Restore mode and restored the system state that I had saved before doing the conversion.  After doing this, you’ll have to reconfigure the network adapter in your VM again to get your TCP/IP settings back.

WHEW!!  A look into the event log showed that replication was happening, and thus the system was now functioning as a domain controller again.  The only weirdness I saw was that the Net Logon service was paused.  Hm?!  I got it going, rebooted a couple times to make certain it wouldn’t pause again, and all seems to be well.

The next step?  Make double-sure that any changes you make to Active Directory get replicated to your other domain controllers.  I went ahead and brought down the second domain controller (the one that didn’t get converted) to make sure that the VM could service logons and run scripts and such.  So far, everything appears to be good!

Right now, the only “What If” I can think of is this… what if we had put the physical DC in Directory Service Restore mode BEFORE the conversion?  Would I have had to restore the SYSVOL tree from a backup?  Is there anything else that could have been avoided?  I’m no expert in this area, but it intrigues me enough that I may try the whole thing over again just to see the results.  I don’t have immediate plans for the physical box, so if it flops, I can always switch it back on for a fix.

Now I just have to find the spare time to try it out.