Santa macked out my MAC

wponder — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 19:33:00 GMT

Sadly enough most my holiday was spent updating my systems and lab. With the final release of ESX 3.5, 3i and VC2.5 I embarked on an upgrade of my VDI lab. Currently, most my systems have been converted to ESX 3i. I just love it, love it, love it. More on that later.

This summer I became a switcher. Windows to MAC. Anyone that knows me, knows I started out as a Windows guy and still am to a large degree. However, after spending six years at a Unix company I have done all things desktop at this point. Windows, Linux and MAC. I was waiting for Fusion to come out of the oven before switching to the MAC and I love it.

The MacBook pro I got this summer was Santa Rosa based 2.2 with 2GB RAM. Originally I started down the bootcamp path with a Vista partition.

OSX
Vista - Bootcamp
XP - VM, my work image

I never found myself booting into Vista and felt the whole bootcamp thing was a waste as I was always using Fusion to access it. Its less flexible than a VM and really buys me nothing. Since I was running out of space, I figured i'd ask Santa for one of those smoking 200GB 7200 RPM drives that plus 4GB RAM I figured would turn my MacBook Pro into a mean VM running machine.

Well Santa delivered... I got my 7200 RPM drive. The next challenge was going to be installing it and migrating. It took some planning but all in all I am extremely satisfied with the results. Below are the steps I took to get from point A to point B

1. I copied my XP virtual machine to some shared network storage
2. Using VC 2.5 with built-in VMware Converter I imported my Vista bootcamp partition into VI3
3. Using an external USB drive I used Time Machine to backup the OSX
4. I did major surgery on the MacBook and installed the 200GB 7200 RPM drive - I recommend you buy a #6 torque!
5. Using the Leopard DVD I booted with the external USB drive attached and did a system restore using Time Machine
6. After rebooting I copied my XP VM back down to the MAC
7. Using VC 2.5 I exported the bootcamp Vista VM that I had converted to a network share and copied it to my MAC.

After copying all my VMs back to the MAC each one successfully booted with no problems. The final result left me exactly where I left off, except I have 80GB more storage, a way faster system overall, and a lot more flexibility with my VMs
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Santa macked out my MAC