I finally got a Virtual Server 2005 VM running with my clients entire intranet SPS 2003 portal running. It took a bit of time to restore all 70GB of content data. What I have now is a 120 GB VM that is a great way to test the upgrade.
Here are some lessons learned:
1. VPC 2007 to Virtual Sever 2005 Does not always work as advertised - I started off this project with a baseline Windows 2003 VPC built on my laptop. The trick is that the VPC used specific IDE controller drivers based on the hardware configuration of my Dell Latitude 820. I tried to move this over as is but got the BSOD during reboot. After several failed attempts to fix the image, I ultimately had to rebuild the image on VS 2005.
2. Size Matters - When you build a new image, make sure you size it appropriately. Dynamic disks are great, but when you need to restore a 52GB database, you need to make sure you have at least that much space to do the restore. Fixed disks do the trick here, but how do you convert a disk that was already fixed at 64 GB? Easy...you download VM Resizer, epand the disk then use DiskPart to extend the partition. Worked like champ. One thing to note, if you are extending a VHD that you plan to keep as an IDE drive, make sure to keep it under the 127GB max size.
3. It makes a "Difference" - Use Differencing disks. Repeat. Use Differencing Disks. It's not easy to use undo disks on a VHD that is 120GB in size. Even on a SAN that's a lot of disk space. By building that baseline and using VS 2005 differencing disks, you can keep that baseline pristine and make changes to a seperate vhd.
4. Know Thy Version - If you follow Jeff Holliday's Blog Entry on Restoring SharePoint Production Servers to Test Servers it is very easy to actually restore the portal. What's the catch? You ABSOLUTELY need to make sure that WSS 2.0 and SPS 2003 are up to the same version. There were a few posts and comments from folks who got this error:
'SvrAdminPortalCreate_SecurityConfigurationSection_Text' is not a valid value for attribute 'TitleLocID'. It must be of enum type 'Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal.WebControls.LocStringId'
This was because there was a mismatch in version between the production source server and the test target servers. You can verify versions against this chart and install the appropriate hotfixes, patches, and service packs.
Hope that this helps someone along the way.