I inherited responsibility for a 2 server SP 2007 farm. One server is a shared sql server, the other is the MOSS 2007 hardware server.
We want to phase out the hardware server, replacing it with a VM. However, we don't want to just take down the hardware, bring up the VM and move on. We want to run them side by side for a bit so that if the VM machine has a problem, we can drop back to the hardware. My thought was to add the VM as a second web front end machine to the farm, and then load balance traffic to it while we verified that everything was running as needed in production.
The problem is this - there was no documentation regarding what was installed on the hardware server provided. I can install MOSS SP 2007 on the VM at the same service pack level, but I am uncertain whether there is anything else installed on the machine that is being used.
It has been suggested that we could do a p-to-v creation of the VM, which would guarantee that everything goes on the VM that is on the hardware. However, I am not certain how we would then run things in parallel - the virtual machine would be a clone of the hardware, so the configuration database would not know that the VM was a different machine from the hardware.
I would really appreciate tips, techniques, recommendations on how best to proceed.
Thank you