Create HA device from physical disk?

[elaw]

Here's the short form of my dumb question: is it possible to create an HA device as/from an image of an existing physical disk?

Now here's the long form...

We currently have two file servers that are "mirrored" via DFS. It's a redundant solution but not a very good one. So what we are going to do is make them into a cluster using Starwind to virtualize the storage, to achieve a true high-availability solution.

The servers are identical, and have separate OS and data drives. Our original plan was to upgrade the OS (as clustering is easier in Windows 2012 than with the 2008 they're running), create a Starwind HA device using both data drives (which are less than half full), set up that device as cluster shared storage, then copy all the existing data onto the shared device. At the end, we'd then expand the Starwind images to use the whole drive capacity.

The problem is these servers have shadow copies ("previous versions") of files going back many months that we'd like to preserve, and copying everything (even using something like Robocopy) from device to device will not preserve the shadow copies.

I've read that file data can be copied and preserve shadow copies by imaging then restoring the drive, but I'm a little wary of doing that since the type of storage is different (physical drive vs. cluster shared storage).

So I'm wondering if maybe there's something built into Starwind that might be able to do that?

[anton (staff)]

You can do it in theory but on practice it's going to have both migration issues and performance ones as well. So the most error prone way would be provisioning new servers from scratch using your backups as a source.