A 3 or 4 minute video on the infrastructure behind the 900 machines used to build the hands on labs at TechEd. It was interesting to see that most of the main servers were all virtual servers and that the virtual images stored on the lab pc’s themselves were deployed using Ghost but the actual OS of the desktop was deployed using Windows Deployment Services (WDS). I’ve never been to TechEd but hope to go one day but it makes me wonder what they used to do before virtual machines existed?
I’ve been busy this morning. I re-ghosted my windows xp partition and then reloaded it back onto my secondary disk. The performance still stays about the same so I’ll be wiping the secondary disk back to HP’s recovery cd and reloading all of the applications again *shudder*. As this is a fairly long post there is more in the extended entry.
I’ve been trying to backup the main pc at home as it’s getting really really slow for a 1 year old pc. Kristen blames it on all the stuff I keep installing on it which is probably true. The weird thing is that I can’t see anything in task manager or perfmon that shows why it is so slow. CPU and memory usage is low yet the machine sometimes takes ages to respond so it’s a reinstall time.
However, before doing that I wanted to image the hard disk – I’ve been attempting to do this since Saturday now. MicroCenter were doing a 160gb hard disk for $40 after rebates so I thought I’d ghost the original disk to my external usb disk and then restore the image to the second disk. (No link as the rebate was only valid until Saturday)
I had several attempts of doing this, but found that the pc would freeze whilst in the middle of the image. Yesterday morning I started the image off and when I came home from work it was still going…. until I shredded something and it crashed ghost with an error back to dos.
I then tried Acronis true image which said it would take 20 hours to ghost the image (of 40gb!) but again this morning it had frozen after running overnight.
By the end of last night I was really fed up with the thing as it shouldn’t be this difficult so I went to sleep and decided to try again this evening.
I’ve a feeling that for some reason my external usb disk is being detected as a USB1 disk instead of USB2 which is why the original ghosting is taking forever.
I’ve now had the idea of ghosting the image direct to the new hard disk from the old one – if that works (which is giving me a realistic time of about an hour to ghost) I may be able to copy the ghost image back to the original disk and then restore it back over to the new disk.
Once I have a working ghost source I can scrub the new disk and reinstall from scratch and also see if I can get vista on the machine too……