Shoving Data Around

I have a problem.  I have lots and lots of data.  Well, actually, I don't have THAT much data, but I have several virtual machines, and also lots of data.  In addition, I have NOT BACKED UP MY SYSTEM in almost six weeks.  Don't get me wrong, I have servers with backups, and the source tree is safe.  But my local development environment is in danger.

I also have an older laptop that used to be our build machine, and I would like to snap a VM from the physical drive so that I can continue to use it, without having to lug the actual  machine around.

Coincidence being what it is, I just happened to drive past a MicroCenter on my way to pick up a couple of dressers my wife bought on craigslist.  So on the way back, I stopped in and looked at the external drives.  I wanted a fast external drive, with a Firewire 800 interface.  I settled on a LaCie d2 Quadra 301110U 500 GB eSATA/FireWire800/FireWire400/USB 2.0 External Hard Drive  which I connected to my MacBook Pro.  I realize it is a desktop solution, but I do not need portability for my external drive at this point, performance is critical.

Since my MacBook Pro has a Firewire 800 connection, I opted for that connector.  I moved all my virtual machines off to the external disk, and as I expected, the performance of my VMs actually improved over using the internal HDD.  I suspect this is because I've added an additional spindle, which is used by the other OS.

Now on to ripping an image from the old laptop.  VMware makes a p2v tool (physical to virtual), but it only runs on Windows (!).  My plan is to fire up one of my WindowsXP laptops (probably my old HP P4) and install the p2v tool.  I picked up a Vantec Sata and Ide To Usb 2.0 Adapter , into which I'll plug the HDD from the old laptop.  Then I'll run the p2v on the P4, into which the USB2.0 interface will be attached.  This little piece of hardware is going to come in handy, I can tell.  I've also got an old desktop machine that a friend of mine wants a hard-drive image of.  I was planning on just plugging the old IDE drive into one of my linux servers and ripping the image, but now I can just connect it to this adapter and pull it onto my MacBook.

I will post results when I've finished.

More On The MacBook

Five weeks into the world of Apple.  My new MacBook Pro is the machine I'm using to compose this.  I must say, after six weeks of very hard use, I absolutely love this thing.  It is an awesome piece of hardware.  Fantastic implementation of an OS.  And VMware Fusion is a very solid implementation of virtualization.

If you are anything like me, the first thing you do on a new machine is start loading all your comfort apps, and customizing the way everything works.  A few weeks after I started using the MacBook, I realized that I had loaded VERY FEW additional applications.  

Here is a breakdown of the additional software I have loaded on the Mac.

• VMware Fusion
  
• Firefox
  
• Microsoft Office
  
• Skype
  
• Chicken Of The VNC (VNC Client http://sourceforge.net/projects/cotvnc )
• Editra (text editor  http://editra.org )
  
• Scribus (desktop publishing http://www.scribus.net )
  

Allow me to explain a couple of these.

• I could not find a VNC client on the base OS, which actually surprised me.  As much as I dislike the name of "Chicken Of The VNC", the tool works flawlessly.
  
• I was surprised and somewhat perturbed that there was no good, colorizing text editor installed by default on MacOS.  I would have been happy with syntax-coloring vim.  After some searching, I decided to check out Editra, mostly because it is written in my favorite language: Python.  So far I am reasonably happy with it.
  
• I added Scribus mostly because I wanted to experiment with it.  Very cool stuff.
  

As a long-time unix user and administrator, I was very happy with many of the tools included with the OS.  One such example: I was thrilled when I opened a shell and typed svn and it was there!