[Cialug] making VM images faster

[Jonathan C. Bailey]

Dave-

Take a look at XenConvert 2. Despite its name, it can convert to a few different formats from a running machine. It does the conversion on the existing server then generates a set of files you can copy. It has worked fairly well from my experience..

BTW, you didn't mention... Are the servers you're converting Linux or Windows?


-Jon

----- Original Message -----
From: "Dave Hala Jr" <dave at 58ghz.net>
To: "Cialug" <cialug at cialug.org>
Sent: Sunday, March 28, 2010 8:50:07 AM GMT -06:00 US/Canada Central
Subject: [Cialug] making VM images faster

I've been converting some existing servers to VirtualBox VM's by
rebooting them into single user mode, mounting an external usb hard
drive and dd'ing the image onto that USB drive.  After I have the dd
image, I'm converting it over to a .vdi file.  The process takes
forever. 4-5 hours for a dd image, 4-5 hours to convert, 45 minutes to
copy the .vdi file onto the host machine.

The bottlenecks appear to be the usb drive and the size of the dd
images. I'm considering just opening the case and connecting a hard
drive to the server's controller.  Anyone come up with a simpler faster
way?


:) Dave



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