ShadowProtect vs Virtual Server 2005

There's some gotchas when doing a P2V server recovery using StorageCraft's ShadowProtect IT Edition and Virtual Server 2005 as the destination.

1. At one time this went without saying, but then we got lazy because recovery software started doing it for us. Make sure your destination volumes (VHDs in this case) are big enough to accept your recovered volumes. This article came in handy.


2. The HAL is going to be different. Once you successfully recover the ShadowProtect images into VHDs, you'll need to grab HAL.DLL and NTOSKRNL.EXE from the original installation media, or alternately, another (ideally similar) VM running under Virtual Server 2005.


3. ShadowProtect's HIR feature helps you out by trying to neuter your driver configuration so that you can restore to any hardware. But you have to return the favor and make sure you don't do anything exotic right off the bat. When configuring your VM initially under Virtual Server 2005, use IDE disks until you get things up and running (and the VM additions installed). Then you can bring down the VM and switch to good old SCSI drivers.

You can see a bit of my progression towards the points above here, on the StorageCraft forums:
http://forum.storagecraft.com/Community/forums/p/1664/7606.aspx#7606.

If I had to do it all again, would I use ShadowProtect? Its a solid maybe. I've actually had an easier time just using NTBackup.