Using ASR Backup/Restore in Windows XP on ESXi

Who the heck runs Windows XP on ESXi anyway? I suppose someone with an excess of Windows XP licenses who doesn’t want to buy TS CALs might do it. Someone with RDP-enabled thin clients might do it as well.

Anyway, I was about to kill the XP workstation VM I used to test my trial run of the SBS 2003 to SBS 2008 migration, and decided to try out this ASR thing. I ran a backup, including ASR. I stored the BKF file on a remote workstation share, and stored the ASR file on a virtual floppy.

Then I created a new VM with appropriate disk, ram, and CPU settings, and attached the virtual floppy image to it. I also inserted the VMware SCSI drivers for Bus Logic into that virtual floppy image. Next, I attached a Windows XP ISO image to the VM, and set it to boot into the BIOS at first boot.

Booted it, fixed the time, set the boot sequence, rebooted.

During boot, I pressed F6 to specify hardware drivers, and pressed F2 to tell it I was doing an ASR operation.

I gave it the VMware hard disk controller drivers, it formatted the hard disk, and we moved on.

About the time I was starting to wonder when this was going to stop being a normal Windows OS load followed by a restore, and start being ASR, some unfamiliar windows came up. The first thing it did was c0mplain about not being able to find the backup at the UNC path listed in the ASR.SIF file. I tried to work around that but quickly came to the realization that either there were no network drivers, or Windows Setup was not allowing me to do any networking at that time.

So what next? How do I get the BKF file to where it can be seen? What would MS be expecting people to do with a physical machine at this point? I suppose it would either be a USB disk (which won’t work in ESXi), or a locally attached hard disk. So, I got creative with VMDK files. I loaded up an extra virtual hard disk on another VM, copied the BKF file to it, shut down that VM, and attached the virtual disk to the XP VM I was trying to restore. Didn’t see it, so I rebooted with it attached. It resumed the ASR process, but once again could not see the second hard disk. The only drives it would see were the C drive and the CD drive.

What finally worked was starting over with a larger VMDK, then shutting down the VM at the first reboot, attaching it to another VM that had a Bus Logic controller, and copying the BKF file to the drive that would become C during the ASR boot.

That done, I fired up the VM with the ASR process running, found the BKF on the C drive, and finished the restore. When done, it booted fine, logged in with cached credentials (the SBS2008 server was undergoing another restore at the time), opened the OST file just fine, and did not require re-activation, even though the disk (and its size) was different.

Since most Server VMs are made using the LSI Logic controller, it means having another XP VM handy to do this trick – or building one from scratch and then using it. Is it worth it to build one from scratch and then go through the ASR restore for the other? I’m not sure, having never done a restore using ASR on a fully loaded XP.

Anyway, it was an interesting experiment.

Tags: ASR, backup, ESXi, Windows XP