I need to create a "Lab" environment of my production 2003 domain server with Exchange2003, before purchasing new hardware & software to migrate in real-time.
I installed VMware onto my laptop and created a Windows 2003 server VM to ensure I could actually achieve what is needed. I the used Acronis to image the server and booted the VM guest using that image which seems to boot fine. However ran into a problem immediately, the original server is OEM so its asking me to activate again on the VM ionstall,
I am worried that should I activate this for testing purposes the actual live machine will be disabled, that wouldn't go down well.
Am I able to activate this by phone with MS and leave live working so I can test the solution works? Failing that could I boot the VM server image and simply run a repair from Windows 2003 boot disk, would that leave my server intact but rectify the registration options?
Any other ideas much appreciated, sure I'm not the first in this position?
Kind regards
Gary
You can do a recovery install over the top to change it to the volume licencing or standard version. You do still need a licence for test copies though, not a problem if you have MSDN covering it.
About the licensing: MS OEM licensing is tied to the original hardware and can't be moved to another host under any conditions, including a P2V virtualisation.
About the migration: P2V of Domain Controllers is fraught with problems. The same is true of Exchange servers. A combo server with both is a double-whammy. I would (quite firmly) recommend that you instead look at creating a fresh server installation, install the Exchange server and domain controller roles, then migrate your directory data and messaging stores into the new environment.