Ian McShane » Virtualization http://www.ianmcshane.org All my stuff in one place Wed, 26 Jan 2011 04:20:25 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Laptop consolidation http://www.ianmcshane.org/2007/12/01/laptop-consolidation/ http://www.ianmcshane.org/2007/12/01/laptop-consolidation/#comments Sat, 01 Dec 2007 18:37:17 +0000 Ian http://blog.maccarocks.com/2007/12/01/laptop-consolidation/
  • VMWare Fusion and network bridging
  • VMWare Fusion – Network Bridge error finally solved
    • ]]>     Continuing my “Switch To Mac” project, i’ve been trying to work out how far I can go in replacing my work laptop with my own Macbook.
    Now, my work laptop is a real bone of contention. It’s a piece of crap Dell Latitude D600. In the past 9 months, the HD has gone three times, a memory module has bust and it has had to be re-imaged by the internal IS&T team 4 times in total. Each time it is re-imaged is two days of almost 100% downtime.
    Unfortunately this re-imaging can’t be done myself as our VPN solution requires a specific AD tied RSA token and without AD domain admin style access I can’t generate a new token and assign it to my account.
    I was checking out the ‘Black Friday’ sale that Apple ran for the UK yesterday (30th November) as i’d decided to pick up a license for iWork ’08 whilst it was on sale, when I saw VMWare Fusion on there also at a discounted rate.
    I’d nearly bought Parallels a couple of days ago but was waiting to speak to a colleague who has recently picked up a MBP to use for work. He’d mentioned Fusion before but I hadn’t heard how he was getting on.
    This led me over to the VMWare Fusion site where I noticed the VMWare Converter. An application you can use to create an exact virtualised replica of a physical device (providing you have administrative access to it obviously). I’d heard about the Enterprise version of this app but hadn’t realised that they had released a kind of consumer version.
    I downloaded Converter and the 30 day trial of VMWare Fusion (VMF from now on) and set about taking an image of my work XP SP2 install.

    After 3 failed attempts at taking an image (Notes: Turn off screensavers, turn off power management) I finally managed to get a good image, weighing in at just over 16GB. Transfered to my MB, load into VMF and shazam.
    I’ve set the NIC to bridge to the network so it appears as it’s own device rather than NATing my MB address.
    Everything works, VPN and all. Amusingly, performance of the VM is _actually_ better than the physical machine!

    SYMCLAPTOP
    Uploaded with Skitch!

    Now, just need to get iSight working in XP….

    Related posts:

    1. VMWare Fusion and network bridging
    2. VMWare Fusion – Network Bridge error finally solved

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