Incredible new utility

I just discovered a cool new utility from Microsoft: Disk2vhd. It’s built by the Sysinternals team; Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell. It’ll capture any disk on your system as a VHD; meaning you can transfer a physical machine to a virtual environment in a snap. I’m going to try to use it to get away from Hyper-V on my laptop, so I can install Windows 7 and run just Virtual PC. I’m thinking I can use this to make  a “running” backup of old computers as well. So when I’m ready to ditch a computer and get a replacement or pave it I can just capture the disk and store it on my Windows Home Server for later. Why would I do this? Because I always forget something; a document on my dekstop or some odd file in the temp folder… Or I can just boot it and see what that great litt utility I  installed 2 years ago on the old Dell laptop was called, because I can’t remember anymore… 😉

Automating virtual machines

In my last job (Synergi Solutions AS) we talked a bit about creating virtual machines as output of our nightly/release builds, but never got around to actually doing it. I just found a link to somebody who’s actually done it; http://tranxcoder.wordpress.com/2008/05/14/using-the-vixcom-library/

Pretty cool! 🙂