Shadow Protect and VMs

[jrmhng]

Hi All,

I've read somewhere that shadow protect can be used to image a real machine and use it as a VM. Is this true? What about making a VM into a bootable image?

Cheers
Jeremy

[rendez2k]

I had a friend who was running Win98 that had a vital piece of software on it no longer available. So I imaged the machine with Shadow Protect and its now running very happily on his XP machine through VMware Player. So yes, it works well!

Not sure how you'd make VM into a bootable image if I understand you right - you need VMware Workstation to make and run the image or VMware Player which is free to run the image (although I believe you can also cheat and get player to create images).

[jrmhng]

What I mean is to go from a go from a phyical machine to a virtual machine and virtual machine into a physical machine. Would you be able to give me specifics? I'm using Virtualbox right now. Will that work or does it need to be vmware player?

[farmerlee]

You can use the free vmware converter to convert your host into a virtual machine and then run it with the free vmware player. The only slight drawback is windows will ask for activation again due to the virtualised hardware being different to your host. It usually gives you 30 days to activate so you can always use the vm for 30 days then just delete it and make a new one.

[rendez2k]

Shadow Protect images are only compatible with VMWare products. If you wanted to put you're VMWare image back on a machine, I guess you could use SP to re-image the VM then put that back on a real machine. That should work fine.

[Meriadoc]

VMware Workstation 6 allows conversion of a ShadowProtect image into a VM.

ShadowProtect can convert to and from VMware...


physical systems to virtual environments - P2V
virtual environments to physical systems - V2P
virtual environments to virtual environments - V2V

VMWare Converter

[jrmhng]

Thanks guys. One of the reasons that I am using virtualbox (apart from the fact that it is free) is that I've been having problems installing vmware tools with some of the more recent kernels. Is there a way I can update the vmware tool iso or compile from the open source edition?