Hi,

Confused about how to install ViBoot and its supported features. I have approx 5 licenses including Reflect Home 7 and Macrium Server edition but I never installed ViBoot. Is there a way to install it once the application is already installed?

Also lets say my server crashed tomorrow is it possible to run ViBoot on another machine running Win 10 and load up my server? 

Last ViBoot will convert backup to Virtualbox file?


Thanks

If you already have Reflect installed, go to Programs and Features, select Reflect, click Change, click Modify, check the viBoot component in the optional features list, and proceed through the wizard to add that component to your existing Reflect installation.  You'll also need to have either Hyper-V or VirtualBox installed.

Regarding your failure scenario, yes you can do that, in fact that the primary use case of viBoot.  Just make sure you have an image backup that contains all necessary partitions to boot Windows, which on most modern systems is NOT just the C partition.  The other machine doesn't necessarily have to be running Win10 either.  It just needs to have Hyper-V or VirtualBox.  There may be minimum version requirements of each (I can't remember offhand, but the documentation should specify it), but I believe for Hyper-V you just need Windows 8 or Server 2012 R2, if memory serves.

viBoot does not really convert anything.  It just gives Hyper-V and VirtualBox the ability to use Reflect image backups as a disk in a VM.  If you check the settings of that VM in Hyper-V/VirtualBox, you will find that the disk points to a file in that hypervisor's native format, but that somehow just redirects to the Reflect image and can be used as a differencing disk, allowing you to make changes to the VM that will persist across restarts without altering the contents of the original backup you started from, because those changes are stored in that separate virtual disk file.  But viBoot does not convert the Reflect backup into a standalone virtual disk, so the Reflect backup itself still needs to remain available.  viBoot does however give you the option to generate a new Reflect backup based on the current state of the VM after you've used it for a while.  That backup can either be a Full backup or a Differential/Incremental backup added to the original backup's set.  This capability is handy in the failure scenario you asked about, since if a server dies and you resurrect it in viBoot for a while, you'll be able to make a new backup of that viBooted server's current state and restore that onto the original hardware when the hardware is available again.

So you mean make sure you image not just the C: drive but the hidden efi partitions on the whole disk? Thats what I usually do.

Next is Viboot exclusive to server edition of Macrium Reflect? Will it run on other versions and assume there is linux support?

Have played around with Virtualbox in the past on both linux and Windows 10, and if a doomsday scenario happens if the server
crashes will probably use Virtualbox as I only have one Server license.

Thanks

ViBoot is included even in Reflect Free, so it’s definitely not exclusive to Server. As for Linux support, that would depend on the hypervisor. Reflect supports capturing image backups of Linux partitions (even though it doesn’t run within Linux), so if you have a good backup of a Linux system, viBoot should be able to attach that image backup to a Hyper-V or VirtualBox VM just as it does with Windows image backups, and at that point as long as the hypervisor can run that OS, you should be home free. There’s nothing I can tell about viBoot that would be dependent on the OS actually installed within the image backup it’s attaching to a VM.

Hyper-V is free if you have Win10 Pro, fyi, although it’s not installed by default. But it’s not available if you have Win10 Home.