Has anyone totally hosed their w2016 installs after doing a sys state restore or sysprep

[peterG]

Here's the sitch, brand new install of the most current VE 5.1 iso. Then multiple new installs of W2016 server (just made a template and FULL clones, not linked clones) with the desktop experience so as to have a gui on each w2016 svr VM, oh & the VM's are using LV Thin block devices (not the older qcow2 method). Just followed the new vid tutorial for w2016 and installed exactly as it shows w/ the Virtio drvrs for block, NIC and Baloon + Qemu agent just as shown in video.. all's well at this point, all good..

Then did a system state restore on just one of the new w2016 VM's. upon reboot, sad surprise, no disk there anymore!??
tried diskpart as part of the w2016 recovery, nothing reckognized. Linux fdisk sees a disk still there..

suspecting that the Virtio block driver got blown away. No way i can see to "inject that driver back".. tried the regular methods.. even tried mounting a PARAGON system recovery CD as a bootable iso, bcs if that worked we could treat the block device as a regular "physical" disk under PARAGON and manipulate injecting teh virtio block driver that way.. anyways PARAGON tries to boot but neve rcompletely does, so no go on that route

Same thing w sysprep also, so whether system state restore .. same results, trashed unbootable VM's ..

At this point woudl like to ask, anyone come up against this? sh Sys State restores and Syspreps not EVER be done?

Thx
-pg

 

[Alwin]

Your base image (the one you clone from) needs to be syspreped and from that you do clones. Or you preseed your installation image.

 

[peterG]

TY Alwin !
Tot understand where U R coming from on this.

The problem is that on running w2016svr VM's (ongoing production VM's that have been already running for a few months) we do on occasion have to overwrite their system state with a new System State restore from another VM or physical w2016 server system.
WHEN we do that, it seems upon reboot, AFTER the system state resore is completed on the target VM, upon the VM reboot, the VM no longer even detects its boot disc..

I suspect its bcs the System State restore has somehow overwritten the block device virtio drivers hence the VM is effectively "blind" as to its boot environment, and when we DO boot into System Recovery (we attach the w2016 DVD in the VM's cd-dvd virtual device) and then run diskpart (as part of the w2016server sys recovery utils) that utility is also "blind" as to any hard disk being present. (remmeber these VM's are VE 5.1 block device, provisioned as LV Thin block devices)
However Linux fdisk DOES indeed reckognize that "a hard disk" is present there where it had previously been ..

What we are now trying is to make a bootable iso of a hard disk utility we use, PARAGON HARD DISK Manager for server systems, that we can use as an alternate boot-from method, bcs w PARAGON we can "inject" a needed boot driver back into the VM's boot image and thus recover the virtio driver if that is what the problem is.. we shall find out soon enough..

TY again Alwin for your response, guidance & advice.
- Peter Gatsoulis
www.MercuriaL.Boston
www.MercuriaL.co