Overcoming Challenges When Rebooting a Virtual Machine
Restoring a virtual machine back out to a new server or a temporary server for a customer can sometimes present MSPs with several challenges, especially if there’s an issue with getting it back up and running in a timely manner.
“The question is, when you restore that virtual machine and it doesn’t boot, how do you fix that?” asks Karl Bickmore, partner at Premier IT, an MSP serving the Los Angeles, Scottsdale and Sacramento areas since 2000.
Bickmore believes MSPs can overcome this obstacle by going through the following steps:
— “First, never use auto transferring tools that we often use for typical file transfers,” he says. According to him, MSPs shouldn’t use robocopy, terracopy, richcopy, etc. to move the virtual image file. “It will run into an interruption and restart the file transfer and that will always corrupt a virtual machine file,” Bickmore says. “You want your file copy to completing cancel if it gets interrupted.”
— “Sometimes you have to do some things to get the virtual machine boot order correctly,” he says. “Always double check which partition is active and which is set to boot.”
— He also suggests that MSPs make sure they have keys for the OS before proceeding “because once you virtualize you will have enter them again and reactivate.”
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