Did you ever wonder how to move a production machine to a virtual machine? Windows Server 2008 is an awesome candidate for such a process. As a matter of fact, if you are making a decision at the moment whether to stick with Windows Server 2003, or jump to the new OS and somewhere back in your mind you are silently wishing – if I could have a stand by duplicate machine or duplicate the production network to a test one, don’t hesitate anymore.
Here is a Step-by-Step video tutorial how to do this. To make the demonstration more interesting, the target server is running Active Directory Domain Services, Exchange Server 2007 SP1, Sharepoint Services, Terminal Services Gateway – in short, it is running SBS 2008.
You can see in the the following Screencast, how to duplicate a physical machine to a virtual one, running on Microsoft Hypervisor.

Step 1 In the first step, we configure a virtual machine on a Windows Server 2008, running Hyper-v.

Step 2 In step2, you can see how to backup a Windows Server 2008 to network share. We are going to use the created backup when we are duplicating the physical machine on the virtual one.

Step 3 Here you will see the actual process of restoring the physical installation of Windows Server 2008 on a virtual machine. The specific moment is that we are using temporarily a Legacy Network adapter – just for the restore from Network Share process to work.

Step 4 : In the last step, we boot the Virtual Machine with the restored server. Once we are done with the restore, we swap back the VMB (Virtual Machine Bus) adapter to get the maximum performance of our Virtual machine. Finally, we check the functionality by testing Exchange server, Sharepoint Services and Terminal Services Gateway.