Hi, I'm researching options for moving off of WHS v1 in an effort to modernize my server and to also gain access to more than 3 GB of addressable RAM for running media servers and other server processes. I may go to Linux + Greyhole, or possibly WHS 2011 + StableBits.
Anyway, once the new OS is installed onto my boot drive, all the existing data will need to be copied over to the new pool. I realize that I can connect a drive and copy over its files, then format it and add it to the new pool, etc., but I was wondering if it would be possible to create a VirtualBox or VMWare image of my existing WHS v1 boot drive and run that on top of the new server OS. That way I could just copy everything from each share on the old system to a share on the new system, without having to separately go to each drive in the pool and deal with the duplicates.
Would this work? I'm having trouble thinking through how a virtualized WHS would treat its NTFS-formatted drives that are mounted under, say, Linux -- and if it would still recognize each drive as a member of the pool. Has anyone taken a physical WHS installation, created a virtual machine out of it, and then run that using the same disk pool drives?
Thanks!