Virtualising your production environment

One question we get asked from time to time by our customers is “How can I create a representative test environment for my production systems?” Typically it can be quite time consuming to get a test environment up and running, especially one that is a mirror of the production environment. Well, the good news is that if you use Virtual Server 2005 R2 as your virtualisation platform it’s really quite easy. Microsoft provides the Virtual Server 2005 Migration toolkit (VSMT) , which will allow you to create images of your physical servers and deploy them as virtual servers.

I’ve used this a few times now and it really does exactly what it says on the tin. You can use it to create a virtual image for NT4 SP6a (Standard and Enterprise), Windows 2000 SP4 (Standard and Advanced) and Windows Server 2003 (Standard and Enterprise). Its also really handy if you want to move your server from a physical box into a virtual environment to run in production without having to rebuild it from scratch.

VSMT is available for download free of charge from https://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/virtualserver/evaluation/vsmt.mspx