I have an HP EliteBook 8560w which is end-of-life and I am migrating over to a new HP ZBook 15 G5.
The old laptop runs Windows 7 Pro x64 and the new Windows 10 Pro x64.
On my old laptop I have VMWare Workstation PRO15 installed and a lot of vm:s on a 2 TB internal datadrive.
I will move the data drive over to the new laptop (I bought a ZBook because it has a 2.5" hdd drive bay in addition to the SSD system drive).
Some issues have arisen when I am planning the move (have not yet started up the new laptop):
1) Install WorkStation PRO15 on new laptop?
Can I install WorkStation PRO15 on the new laptop with the same license I used on the old one or do I have to buy a new or uninstall on the old one first?
When I am all done and verified the new laptop I will uninstall Workstation PRO15 from the old laptop.
2) Cloning the old laptop?
I need to be able to access the old laptop even when it is retired. A virtual machine clone would be fine.
I have a very recent system backup made by Windows Backup in the form of 2 vhd files, presumably one is the C: system drive and one is the hidden Windows drive. They are 288 and 61 GB in size respectively.
Can I clone the laptop using one or both of these vhd files or do I need to use some other method?
I will uninstall a whole bunch of software from the old laptop to reduce its footprint first of course.
Any advice and reports of similar tasks welcome!