Dugie’s Pensieve

My USB Key goes everywhere with me, mostly because it stays in my wallet.  There is a piccy over there (US readers can substitute a dime for the 5c piece), The usb key is the blue Sony MicroVault in the middle — and yes it is really a USB key

My USB key has wealth of life saving utilities and programs on it.  With everything that has happened in the last few days, I thought I’d post my Top 10 VHD virtualization utilities:

1. VHD Expand - simple no nonsense tool to make VHD files bigger
2. VMDK2VHD - again, a simple no nonense way to convert a Vmware VMDK to a Microsoft VHD
3. Whitney Defrag - a portable an beautiful solution  to defrag, speed up and make smaller any 2003 or XP Virtualmachine or host
4. PageDefrag - same as above, but for your Pagefile.  Works great both in a Virtualmachine and on the host.
5. Angry IPScan - brilliant for quickly scanning a subnet and looking for the the default OUI (”00-03-ff”) of Virtualmachines
6. Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 - VHDMount = good ’nuff said!
7. VMRCplus - Manage Virtual Server without IIS
8. Robocopy - Copy big files over bad networks and not worry about it failing.
9. vXCopy -   Multithreaded copy tool , copy big files fast
10. Process Explorer - Task manager on steroids, know exactly what your host (or virtual machines) are doing.
11. UPDATE:  WinImage - Just too good not to mention, perfect for making ISOs from CDs and disk images and stuff. 

I didn’t want to list all the stuff on my USB key today, and there is a mix of scripts, utilities and programs (VirtualPC 2007 for instance).  But this will do for starters. 

How about you guys?  Any tools you can’t live without?

Looks like green is the way of the future - and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.  I was reading “Google and Intel pledge to go green” and found this interesting:

The Climate Savers Computing Initiative [supported by Dell, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Microsoft] aims to make computers 50 per cent more power efficient by 2010. The companies say that achieving this goal would save an amount of carbon dioxide equivalent to that released by 11 million cars in a year. Urs Holzle, senior vice president of operations at Google, said: “Today, the average desktop PC wastes nearly half of its power and the average server wastes one-third of its power.”

The plan would save an estimated $5.5 billion in energy costs and would, its proponents say, increase the cost of a computer by only about $30 per unit. Reduced running costs would pay for the extra outlay within a couple of years, they say.
…
“We’re also concerned that this initiative will be used to drive sales of more power efficient machines – contributing to global piles of e-waste – when there are many things people can do with existing machines to reduce power consumption, such as switching off monitors,” a spokesman said.

Google and Intel say that their benchmarks follow guidelines set out by the Environmental Protection Agency, which encourage manufacturers to meet minimum energy efficiency standards in order to bear an approved logo.

Of course I imagine Virtualization will play some [even perhaps minor] part in this.  I started thinking about this, and had bizarre flashbacks to assorted sci-fi movies.

Who knows, maybe in a few years it will be perfectly normal to put our Virtual Machines into some sort of stasis/hypersleep; migrate all the VMs to just a couple of physical hosts; and then put the unused physical hosts into some sort of power off or powersaving mode;  …and when VMs are needed reverse the process as necessary.

…and some of you might even catch my bad pun of hypersleep, reference to hypervisor - the purists will argue that suspended animation would be better :)