Virtualize your SBS 2008 or 2011 and run it as a virtual machine on Hyper-V server By Mariette Knap virtualized, hyper v The Numinous Travel Company has an 8-year-old SBS 2011, and the hardware is now out of the warranty. They had some issues lately with the hardware related to memory banks not working. The new hardware has arrived, a spanking new server with loads of memory, a fast disk subsystem and a Xeon processor with 12 cores. If you are going to migrate your SBS 2011 to a new Windows Server 2016 or 2019 and you have the same situation as the Numinous Travel Company, you will also want to virtualize the SBS and run it as a Virtual Machine on the new server. That way you don’t have to worry anymore about the flaky hardware that can crash any time during your migration. Though some do not advice to virtualize a Domain Controller I have done this several times with great success. On the SBS 2011 make sure you have a big USB drive connected where we will save the virtualized environment. But if the new server has already the operating system installed you can save the virtualized environment on a share. Download disk2vhd from Disk2vhd - Windows Sysinternals | Microsoft Docs and install it on your old server or run it live from Sysinternals Live. Disk2vhd does not support the conversion of volumes with Bitlocker enabled. If you wish to create a VHD for such a volume, turn off Bitlocker and wait for the volume to be fully decrypted first. 1. Virtualize the SBS with Disk2VHD If you want to save the vhdx file on your new server but you have not yet created a share you can also browse the new server by \\hostname\c$. It may prompt you for credentials. Start Disk2VHD and change the location where you want to save the files to a USB drive or a share on your new server. Uncheck any drive you don’t want to be included and hit create. It is running If it is done click Close Browse to the location where you saved the file, it is there and that is the vhdx file we will mount in our Virtual Machine on our Hyper-V Host that runs on new hardware. If you a very smart engineer you can also wipe the hardware on which the SBS ran and re-use that if it is not that old. Remember if you do this you will run into something that is called ‘Disk Signature Collisions’. Here is how you fix that Fixing Disk Signature Collisions – Mark's Blog 2. Mount the vhdx file in Hyper-V to a new Virtual Machine. If you don't see Hyper-V Manager in the Tools menu you need to install the role using 'Add roles and features'. From Server Manager start Hyper-V Manager Choose New > Virtual Machine Type a name Next Choose Generation 1 because the SBS 2011 is still Windows Server 2008 and does not run as a Generation 2 VM Set enough Ram to start the server. I choose 8 GB but more is better. Choose a network adapter. Try to stay in the same network as the SBS originally was. Makes it a lot easier then changing the network on the SBS Choose the vhdx we made of the physical SBS Click Finish Double click the SBS VM in the list and click the green start button. There it is! Our good old SBS is virtualized. Ready to be migrated.