Does the creation of Virtual Machines work in B&R10?

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Hello,

I've been unable to create virtual machines from any of my TIB files since I upgraded to B&R10. I upgraded because I was hoping that the software would do this automatically as is claimed. On most occasions the auto-creation of the virtual machine fails when attempting this from the management console. After trying to get this working for a couple of weeks I decided to give up and create the machines the way I used to when I ran the Echo software (ie create a virtual machine manually and boot it using an Acronis boot disk with Universal Restore and point it at the TIB file). The restore happens without error but the resultant virtual machines won't boot (they try, but I just end up with a black screen). If I reboot the virtual machine I get a message saying that Windows failed to run and I get the option of trying to run it in Safe mode. If I do this I see a list of the various drivers being loaded before the machine freezes.

Has anyone got this working? It seems to me that the Universal Restore component isn't actually working even though I'm asked if I want to use it when I do the restore. This used to work fine in Echo so what's changed? One week to go until our disaster recovery test and I've only successfully created one virtual machine out of about 30 attempts.

The attached screen dump shows where the boot process freezes when choosing to boot the virtual PC in safe mode.

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Gio, 05/06/2010 - 12:52
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Hello John Sellars,

Thank you for your post. I will definitely help you with this.

It would really help us to determine the cause of the conversion issue that you were experiencing, if you could provide us with additional information. Which build of Acronis Backup and Recovery 10 were you using, the latest one is 11639, which virtual machine were you converting to, what errors, if any were you getting and at what part of the conversion process?

As you mentioned, using the Acronis Universal Restore component from the bootable CD is a reliable workaround when conversion fails. When you wrote, that you restored the image to the virtual machine and enabled Acronis Universal Restore, did you point to a folder with mass storage drivers for that specific virtual machine? By default, during conversion, our software uses a set of virtual machine drivers which are located in this folder: C:\Program Files\Common Files\Acronis\UniversalRestore\DriversPack

You can try restoring one more time and point Acronis Universal Restore to this folder. I am confident that your newly restored machine will be bootable.

However, I do understand that this is only a temporary workaround and you would like to stick with conversion, that is why if you can help us by providing additional information, that would be terrific!

Just in case, if you need immediate assistance, please contact our support directly, we will be able to resolve any issue that you may have.

Please let me know if you have any other questions.

Thank you.

Gio, 05/06/2010 - 18:27
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Hello Anton,
Here's some answers to your questions:
I'm using the latest build of the Acronis software.
The virtual machines I am attempting to create are for Microsoft Virtual PC/Server.
If I create a task to create a TIB file followed by the creation of a virtual machine, the TIB file is usually successfully created but the virtual machine creation pretty much always fails to happen.
I've had slightly more success if I attempt a recovery to a virtual machine from an existing TIB. I don't understand why this would be more reliable though.
Tasks which create virtual machines NEVER finish. Even if they are successfull they always lock at 100% - I've no idea how to get rid of them when this happens.
Some tasks stop when they are about 66% of the way through the process. They always seem to report that a file relating to power management is missing. If I clcik to ignore this message the task continues and can complete successfully (it jumps from 66% to 100% almost immediately though which seems a bit suspicious).
At the moment only about 1 in 15 of the created virtual machines will actually boot (compare this to Echo which had a success rate of about 90%).
Even the machines that will boot need manual intervention to make them useable. For example the driver for the network card has to be manually installed (but shouldn't this happen automatically)?
The boot disk I have created includes the Drivers Pack but I still end up with non-bootable virtual machines.

Have a look at the attached file. It is a screen dump of my Management Console showing the status of the various policies I have deployed. You will see that none of the schedule tasks have completed successfully - not a great advert for the software is it? Infact the only task that did complete successfully was one I initiated manually.

Since we are getting desperate now (with our disaster recovery test fast approaching) we have abandoned use of the management console altogether and are now just using script files and the Acronis command tool to create our virtual machines. This seems to be fairly reliable. The only annoying thing we've found is that we can't create virtual machines for computers with hard drives greater than 125GB (even when the volume with the OS is only 40GB). Surely the size of the physical disk is irrelevant? It's the size of the volume that matters.

Hope this feedback is of some help.

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Ven, 05/07/2010 - 10:19
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UPDATE:

After a lot of browsing on Google I've realised what the problem is. The Acronis software doesn't seem to be putting the correct version of the HAL.DLL file on the virtual disk. This relates back to the error message that some tasks were halted by ("missing halacpi.dll").

To resolve the non-booting virtual machines I did the following:

Mounted each VHD file on my Microsoft Virtual Server using the VHDMOUNT utility which comes with the Virtual Server software.
Copied HALACPI.DLL to the \Windows\System32 folder of each mounted drive.
Renamed HAL.DLL to HAL.DLL.BAK on each mounted drive.
Renamed HALACPI.DLL to HAL.DLL on each mounted drive.
Unmounted all virtual drives and booted each virtual workstation.

All machines now boot.

I'm not sure why this used to work fine in Echo though. The OS I'm backing up has changed from XP SP2 to XP SP3 so maybe that's where the problem lies? No matter, at least I can virtualise our workstations for our DR test now. Finally I can get on with the task in hand rather than worrying about the vagueries of the software. I'm still not going back to using the Management Console though - experience tells me that I can struggle with that for weeks and not get any successful backups out of it. Scripting using the Acronis command line tool seems to be the way to go if it's backup reliability you're after....

Ven, 05/07/2010 - 13:05