Acronis True Image 9.1 was released and has added benefits to the product that many of you may have used in the past.  What used to be another "ghost" type imaging tool is now more akin to a P2V solution, for those of us working and living in the virtualization world.

Adding a new feature to its already feature packed cloning tool, Acronis Universal Restore Option, it in essence adds a P2V package to allow you to restore a saved computer image on to a different piece of hardware (sound like P2V yet?).  In fact, not only can you go from a physical server to a virtual machine, it allows you to restore that image to a different piece of hardware.  This makes the package a very useful resource tool to provide disaster recovery planning.

So how does it work?  Acronis describes it with 5 easy steps:

1. Boot into their recovery environment
2. Select the image to restore and the replacement system
3. Acronis Universal Restore initiates the restore process
4. Acronis Universal Restore detects the hardware and installs the drivers
• The product detects the machine type and installs appropriate drivers for Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL)
• The product detects hard disk controllers (SCSI and IDE) or
• The product prompts you for the driver locations
5. The machine reboots and Acronis Universal Restore begins mini-setup to load drivers into the Operating System.

Once complete, you have a working system to a replacement machine.  No reinstallation of the OS or applications is required.  No reconfiguration to join the network is required. 

The product retains its SID and networking information, so if you plan on using this as a cloning and replication tool, be sure to add scripting to your new image to replace the SID and network configuration as needed.