[ALUG] How do people here manage updates (or not)?

[Wayne Stallwood]

On Mon, 2007-11-05 at 22:27 +0000, samwise wrote:

> I guess you're looking for a more complicated reason than I didn't
> know of their existence?  :)  If you'd been there we could have
> discussed a use case I hadn't been thinking about!
> 
:) fair enough..we tend to use VMware for hosting DR or test systems so
I am guessing we would have had more exposure to the p2v stuff.

> Looking into it now, it looks like it has been replaced by the
> freeware VMware Converter Starter tool.

Yes there are two versions of the Converter tool, a freeware one and a
paid for one..key differences are that the freeware one doesn't manage
multiple migrations at the same time and cannot do an offline (Boot CD)
conversion which is a lot faster for systems that can suffer the
downtime.

> 
> Not at all, it's just not a use case I've ever really had and, to be
> honest, I had no idea there was a specific tool to clone an active
> system!
> 
It sort of works a bit like magic..you run the tool from either the host
or the (to be)guest or even from another machine in the middle and it
creates a VM copy of the machine, substituting device drivers etc on
route. Takes a while on busy machines and due to the specific way things
like sql databases and exchange stores are mounted requires that you
still take clean offline copes of those. Well worth playing with though
I even used it so that the Windows VM on my laptop is a clone of the
original XP installation.

You can still do things offline because another facility is to create a
VM from a ghost image of the original machine, this is in fact how I
created my laptop VM..from the Windows recovery media that contained a
ghost image of the original installation.

> That said, given that I assume the resulting virtual machine would
> take up as much disk space as the original system, I can't see I would
> be using it much - I don't have that much disk space to spare!
> 
It can on the fly resize the volume to be copied down to any size larger
than the current used space in the windows partition and then generate
it as a VM image that grows as needed (having images that grow does
however have a performance impact in VMware)

> Certainly it would be fiddly to convert an active system to
> VirtualBox.  

Yes before the conversion tool worked we attempted ghosting physical
machines into virtual machines and it was often fraught with the same
problems you often get moving a Windows installation to different
hardware. Sometimes it works with minimal effort, sometimes it boots
into a BSOD and needs a repair installation and sometimes something so
significant has changed that hardly any amount of poking will fix it.
Generally we would eventually succeed but at a time cost greater than it
would have been to build the system from scratch.

> Basically, I concluded that VirtualBox edges it overall, for personal
> use, (the seamless Windows feature - demo'd at October's meet - is
> fantastic) and is mostly GPL too but that if you need to collaborate
> with lots of other people or have to distribute your machines, then
> it's worth considering VMware Player.  It's just so time consuming and
> bandwidth hungry to have to rely on sites like EasyVMX to get a blank
> machine, tho ...

Yes although of course you can download vmware server and vmware player
creating machines in server that can then be booted in player..but then
we are getting a bit messy. I will however give VirtualBox a try as it
may be better option than Vmware Server for me at home and given the
number of VMware licences we already have I am hesitant to purchase
another workstation licence just for home use.