Security Analyst – Jeff Soehner CISSP, GXPN,GPYC,GMOB,GCIH

The new platespin migrate has come out last August and we thought it was time to test drive it on the Hyper-V SP2 cluster we have created. Unfortunately you cannot directly connect to a cluster or a Hyper-v host so you have to setup your new environment in what PlateSpin calls a semi-automatic mode. This requires that you boot an ISO image on the target virtual machine making sure to set it up with as little or more resources as your source (hard drive, space, RAM, etc.)

One of the nice things we notice right away is the use of a debugger for determining why the boot loading/registering process won’t work. It also has the ability to inject drivers after a failed migration which is very handy too!

(As an aside – we noticed that our XP test failed to boot stating that there was not enough memory when in fact we were using 512MB and platespin only requires 384MB. They do have a smaller memory boot ISO available if you need it but in our test platform this issue was resolved by using the new dynamic memory feature of Hyper-V SP2.)

After the controller is downloaded and started we wait a few minutes for the discovery process to finish and we have a new target that shows up in our Platespin migrate client.

You can see the new target appearing on the bottom of our display above. The boot ISO images register with the PlateSpin Migrate server using a randomly generated host name.

We can then deploy our Windows XP image using an image that we have captured to our new Hyper-V target.