Virtualize my work machine.
Some experiments take some time. Others take much longer. Although they are not so complicated. Data-intensive operations take a long time.
My experiment was to visualize my working machine. It's very good machine (gaming 14" MSI that I adore) but still it can be better :) In azure in the MSDN subscription I have money to spent so I can create quite heavy loaded machine with not so big price - of course if I don't use it all the time. And working machine should be (at least in theory) working only 8 h / 20 days a month.
With this assumption machine with 4 cores and about 15GB ram will cost about 60-80 € well... at least the machine, because we still need to pay for storage. And storage is cheap on HDD 128GB is about 2,5 €, but not so cheap on SSD (premium storage 128GB ~ 20€). Still it is possible to have very fast and efficient machine in MSDN 'free money' capacity.
Aaaa that's enough about money. I want my fast machine working already. Yeah but I have one more requirement. I want it to be 'my machine'. All my settings, all applications that I already have installed. I have fully functional machine with Xamarin and Android development environments. It took me probably two days to configure it and I want it recreated in a cloud.
First things first. Create image from existing physical machine.
In the old days it was pain in the.. but not so much anymore. I used this article installed Disk2VHD and used it with default settings. I have very nice big and fast SSD drive. But in this case it was not a good thing. I also have a lot of stuff installed and stored on my drive. I just used this tool like blonde. And I created Vhdx because it's default, if you want VHD you need to uncheck "Use Vhdx". Creating Vhdx from my working machine took 3h. And I didn't want to make it once again to create Vhd. So this is my first fail.
But I also have Work Computer. Not so fast and fabulous as my MSI, but it works and fulfills my requirement - it's mine working environment. I't also a little less filled with junk. It took about 2h to create Vhd (it's 160GB file, and that's not so nice because I need 250GB of storage).
Step two. Put VHD on azure storage.
It's easy enough... but so time consuming that this is disaster. It took about 16h to put 160GB in azure storage account (yeah I took the smaller file).
Yeah this will be much quicker now. Let's read some instructions.
Boom
Here is a full instruction to my goal. And I failed again. First step is 'Prep the VHD' - wait what? I already upload it. Yeah because you're too eager!
Step back. Prep the VHD
So apparently this is not so easy to prepare vhd, it's because of windows licencing and probably some other reasons I don't even want to know. To strip system of all things that would standing in a way of restoring in another way I need to use Sysprep.
Ok I give up.
Now I know what should be done. But it took me 3 days (well I didn't watched the progress bar but still the upload took whole day and better part of night). And I would need to upload vhd file again.
I can configure my working machine in much less. Enough is enough.
And I will go this way. As an additional plus - I'm aware that storage is very costly so I can restrict my desire to have it all.
My experiment was to visualize my working machine. It's very good machine (gaming 14" MSI that I adore) but still it can be better :) In azure in the MSDN subscription I have money to spent so I can create quite heavy loaded machine with not so big price - of course if I don't use it all the time. And working machine should be (at least in theory) working only 8 h / 20 days a month.
Aaaa that's enough about money. I want my fast machine working already. Yeah but I have one more requirement. I want it to be 'my machine'. All my settings, all applications that I already have installed. I have fully functional machine with Xamarin and Android development environments. It took me probably two days to configure it and I want it recreated in a cloud.
First things first. Create image from existing physical machine.
In the old days it was pain in the.. but not so much anymore. I used this article installed Disk2VHD and used it with default settings. I have very nice big and fast SSD drive. But in this case it was not a good thing. I also have a lot of stuff installed and stored on my drive. I just used this tool like blonde. And I created Vhdx because it's default, if you want VHD you need to uncheck "Use Vhdx". Creating Vhdx from my working machine took 3h. And I didn't want to make it once again to create Vhd. So this is my first fail.
Step two. Put VHD on azure storage.
It's easy enough... but so time consuming that this is disaster. It took about 16h to put 160GB in azure storage account (yeah I took the smaller file).
Yeah this will be much quicker now. Let's read some instructions.
Boom
Here is a full instruction to my goal. And I failed again. First step is 'Prep the VHD' - wait what? I already upload it. Yeah because you're too eager!
Step back. Prep the VHD
So apparently this is not so easy to prepare vhd, it's because of windows licencing and probably some other reasons I don't even want to know. To strip system of all things that would standing in a way of restoring in another way I need to use Sysprep.
Ok I give up.
Now I know what should be done. But it took me 3 days (well I didn't watched the progress bar but still the upload took whole day and better part of night). And I would need to upload vhd file again.
I can configure my working machine in much less. Enough is enough.
And I will go this way. As an additional plus - I'm aware that storage is very costly so I can restrict my desire to have it all.
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