Today during class we had a discussion  about testing things like upgrades, refresh and replace. It is of course possible to deploy a new virtual machines with all apps, but that kind useless, that is always going to work, so we need another solution…

Clone it

Yes, that is going to be the best and easy approach, you basically take a copy of the machine and try it on that. This way you have a “dirty” machine that contains real apps, real profiles and real data. If you use VMware you can use the P2V tool and if you use Hyper-V you can use Disk2VHD from SysInternals.

1. Reboot the physical machine, log in as Admin
2. Create a local admin account that works to logon even if the machine is disconnected from the network
3. Download and run disk2vhd, save the VHDx file on a file share or disk
4. Build a new VM and use the vhdx file you saved
5. Start the VM, disconnected from the network
6. Disjoin from the domain and rename
7. Connect back to network
8. Start and join to the domain
9. Move it to a regular OU
10. If you have a ConfigMgr agent, you might need to remove, or reinstall, or reset ID, same goes for other agents, like Antivirus
11. Turn off
12. Snapshot/Checkpoint
13. Start and lets play