Bare metal recovery from backup media to virtual machine
View Patent ↗A legacy computer system receives a hard drive or other hardware failure. Rather than attempting to rebuild the computer system or recover selected data, which may require locating discontinued hardware or even software, a virtual machine image is created from a previously prepared backup image of the hard drive. The retrieved backup image is modified to create a virtual image that is bootable on a virtual machine. Thus, the original computer environment stored on the legacy system is now virtualized removing the need to repair or replace the failed hardware.
1. A method for recovering one or more selected computer systems, comprising:
retrieving one or more backup images corresponding to the one or more selected computer systems;
converting the backup images to a virtual hard drive image; and
storing the converted virtual hard drive image in a catalog of virtual hard drive images corresponding to damaged and/or obsolete computer systems.
2. The method of claim 1 , wherein the virtual hard drive image is stored in a virtual hard drive image server.
3. The method of claim 1 , further comprising discarding the selected computer systems.
4. The method of claim 1 , wherein at least one of the selected computer systems is damaged.
5. The method of claim 1 , further comprising executing the virtual hard drive image on a virtual machine.
6. A computer-readable storage medium with computer-executable instructions stored thereon for performing the method of:
retrieving one or more backup images corresponding to one or more selected computer systems;
converting the backup images to a virtual hard drive image; and
storing the converted virtual hard drive image in a catalog of virtual hard drive images corresponding to damaged and/or obsolete computer systems.
7. The computer-readable storage medium of claim 6 , wherein the virtual hard drive image is stored in a virtual hard drive image server.
8. The computer-readable storage medium of claim 6 , further comprising discarding the selected computer systems.
9. The computer-readable storage medium of claim 6 , wherein at least one of the selected computer systems is damaged.
10. The computer-readable storage medium of claim 6 , further comprising executing the virtual hard drive image on a virtual machine.
11. A system for recovering one or more selected computer systems, comprising:
a computer processor adapted to:
retrieve one or more backup images corresponding to the one or more selected computer systems;
convert the backup images to a virtual hard drive image; and
store the converted virtual hard drive image in a catalog of virtual hard drive images corresponding to damaged and/or obsolete computer systems
a storage device adapted to store the catalog of virtual hard drive images.
12. The system of claim 11 , wherein the storage device is a virtual hard drive image server.
13. The system of claim 11 , wherein at least one of the selected computer systems is damaged.
14. The system of claim 11 , wherein the computer processor is further adapted to execute the virtual hard drive image on a virtual machine.