shareVM- Share insights about using VM's

Here are the Top 12 referrers to our blog over the past 3 months, the numbers of referrals are in parentheses.

1. http://pro-linux.de/berichte/ext4/ext4.html (546)
2. http://dabcc.com/article.aspx?id=9653 (342)
3. http://networksecuritytoolkit.org/nst/index.html (110)
4. http://polishlinux.org/apps/cli/ext4-defragmentation-with-e4defrag/ (59)
5. http://communities.vmware.com/thread/189804?tstart=0 (49)
6. http://techblog.41concepts.com/2008/03/31/shrink-your-windows-disk-image-on-wmware-fusion-mac/ (42)
7. http://blog.rightscale.com/2009/01/09/amazon-launches-ec2-console/ (37)
8. http://wordpress.com/tag/vhd/ (33)
9. http://wordpress.com/tag/vmdk/ (32)
10. http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2009/01/updated-homebrew-esx-hardware-list.html (32)
11. http://blogs.msdn.com/heaths/archive/2005/07/30/445621.aspx (32)
12. http://kakku.wordpress.com/2008/06/23/virtualbox-shrink-your-vdi-images-space-occupied-disk-size/ (31)

Thank you for the referrals. Hope the content is meaningful for our readers.

How to replicate Hyper-V VHDs for DR?
The author is looking for a block-level transfer tool like rsync on Windows. A respondent has suggested using Volume Shadow Copy Services (VSS). However, VSS needs space for shadow copy data and this becomes an issue if you have large VM’s to transfer and are short of space.

scp is a secure transfer tool like rsync that is used for performing remote copies of files, including vhd mages across the LAN or the Internet.

Mircosoft recommends that customers can implement a backup or a disater recovery solution within their WAN using the File Replication Services (FRS2) of the Distributed File System (DFS) of Windows 2003 server R2, or later. This solution will perform well over the WAN, if WAN acceleration is in use. However, if WAN acceleration is not in use, then they should enable the Remote Differential Compression (RDC) protocol available in Windows 2003 Server R2, which Optimizes File Replication over Limited-Bandwidth Networks

Read about the use of rsync for vmdk, vhd backup and disaster recovery.

I use ftp to transfer large VM image of my code to a remote development team based in India and rsync for copying and backing up code, configuration and data from ec2. I researched the web for best practices that have evolved for speeding up large VM transfers. It seems there are none today, unless you are transferring VM’s on your company’s WAN and they are using WAN accleration to improve the transfer rate. However, I have found two models for using rsync with vmdk’s and  vhd’s. Here’s a sample of use cases:

Cloud-centric usage

rsync is used for copying and backing up code, configuration and data from cloud-based services like Amazon ec2.

• Here is an excellent guide to Backup with rsync and ec2
• rsync, s3 and backups
• Migrate to aws/ec2

Traditional usage

rsync is used for backing up large VM’s to a remote store or for disaster recovery

• rsync to offsite locations
• rsync virtual machine backups
• Staging a disaster recovery VM

Read about Backup, Disaster Recovery for Windows VM’s

I got an Amazon EC2 account and wanted to upload image from my laptop to Amazon. First few attempts took way too long (creating the AMI was another saga). So I thought there has to be a better way to do this. After searching for a couple of hours, here are all the links I found. Finally I just went to amazon and redid all the work starting from a pre-registered public AMI. 

Solutions

• Dutch University uses Bit Torrent to Update Workstations
• How to transfer .vmdk files over the network
  • WinSCP & Veeam FastSCP

Research

• Tools & Techniques for Managing Virtual Machine Images [Brief Summary]
• Using Bit Torrent for transferring virtual machine images

Patents

• Deployment & Scaling of Virtual Environments