Migrating Data from Old VM to USB Drive | Nutanix Community
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Hello,

We have an old VM that is in our Nutanix cluster. It is running an old version of Windows server, and our Cyber department does not want it connected to the network. There has been a request to retrieve historic data from the server.  Is there a way to boot the server with the network disconnected and use a USB drive connected to the Nutanix host to export the data? If there is no way to do that what other possibilities will work? Can the virtual disk from the old server be mounted on a new network connected VM?

 

Thanks

I’ve done this type of thing before. In that case, I cloned the server, then added a new drive of a unique size. I installed Linux (but you could use Windows) on the new drive, and booted the system and mounting up the disks there.  That way it’s running a modern OS that meets your security dept’s requirements but also has the data.  Then you can copy off the data to wherever.  

Are you just trying to get a subset of data from the VM, or the entire disk?   How comfortable are you with the command line?  

What you COULD do is this, it’s not supported, but is something I’ve had to do in the past in similar scenarios.
1 - Modify the VM configuration to remove the NIC adapter

2 - Power up the VM (not attached to network)
3 - Identify the physical host the VM is running on
4 - Attach the USB device to the back of the physical host

5 - Use acli to identify the UUID of the vm (acli vm.list | grep <VM Name>)

5 - Log in to the AHV host and identify the USB device vendor and product IDs (XXXX:YYYY format)
6 -  Create a file with the following data in it in /tmp/my_usb_device.xml (name is arbitrary)

<hostdev mode='subsystem' type='usb' managed='yes'>

    <source>

        <vendor id='0xXXXX’/>

        <product id='0xYYYY'/>

    </source>

</hostdev>

7 - Attach the device to the VM:

virsh attach-device <UUID of VM> /tmp/my_usb_device.xml

8 - Rescan hardware in the VM and your USB device should show up, you can now copy the data from the VM onto the USB drive.   

9 - After copying the data, shut down the VM, then remove the drive from the back of the host.

NOTE: This is not supported, and the attachment will go away if the VM is shut down and powered up again, and could cause issues if the VM tries to HA between hosts for any reason, so proceed with caution.

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