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VHD

So I'm playing around with VHD files at work today.  Basically, it came out of looking up 10 gig switching equipment this morning.

So, last night at running club I started chatting with this one guy who helps to run the network down at the Wells Fargo center.  He was saying how their main internet pipe and network is a 10 gig hook up.

I was trying to convince my boss that we should connect all our servers to a 10 gig switch and get 10 gig cards on our servers and then the backups would be faster and the file transfers between servers would also be faster... Etc. etc.

Those switches are WAY too much money.  I mean, maybe we could swing one, but they are some serious cash.

Well, so he says that he doesn't think the exchange backups will take anyway across a network because they need a local attached drive.

I do some Googling and find out that you can mount a VHD file hosted on your network and have it appear locally.  Tried it out on my own machine, and now I'm using it to do my own backup.  We'll see how well it works.  So far it's pretty snazzy!

The thing I like about it is, on my backup drives, I previously had my files just on the drive... So, I moved all the files from the drive, into the VHD drive, and cleared the drive.

Now, on my external drives I just have 1 VHD file.

Why is this cool?  Because now my backup is different.  Instead of backing up the same files to 3 drives, I back up the files to 1 VHD drive, and then just copy the VHD file to the other 2 drives.  I'm a bit weird and like 3 backups.

Anyway, so... The transfer seems faster just coping the one file.  The other advantage to this is that I can just add the date of the copy to the end of the file, and the copy another one, and another one, and another one.

If I want to "go back in time", I can just find the VHD from the date I want, and mount it, and browse away!

The other advantage to it is that if I want to use one of my backup drives to temporarily store files, It's a lot easier to copy a folder real quick from a machine I'm working on, and know which is someone else files, and which are mine.

We'll see what else I get out of it, or how well it works.  I feel like VHD drives are the way to go.

I'm about to do that with my own work PC.  I'm going to make a virtual file of my current PC, then copy the virtual file over to my new PC and mount it.  Then continue to work in the virtual PC while I migrate to the new PC.  I'm considering not putting things on the base OS though.  I might setup a second guest OS and just work entirely in virtual guest OSes.

The advantage to all of this is, that since I'm putting a layer between myself and the base OS, I'm not tied to the hardware.  I can just shut down the virtual machine, move it to a new PC and start it back up.

That way if someone needs to use my PC because it has some specific video card or whatever, they can just take it, and I'll put my VHD pc on a new box and be back up and running almost instantly.

Ideally, I wouldn't mind just running my PC on a server and remotely connecting to the PC using a thin client box.

I mean who knows, it may not work that well, we'll see.  I think it's fun to test it out though and see how well it works!

It's always fun to do new things or try new things out and see.  Either it will be fantastic, or it will flop.  The VHD thing so far is definitely working as far as my backups go.  I've already created the VHD, copied my files to the virtual mounted drive, and now I'm copying the virtual mount backup VHD file to my two other external hard drives.  So far so good!