The Marvels of Virtualisation
I had a bit of a geeky afternoon at work yesterday - I got a load of stuff moved from one computer to another. For the first time (for me) though, I used a VMWare Virtual Machine to do all of the transferring.
I've been using VMs for a while now on a knock-about desktop machine I have at werk (running Linux). I use the VMs so that I can try stuff out on the different operating systems and versions we have at work. I also run a few 'proof of concept' web tools for people internally too.
Moving this stuff from one machine to the next was incredibly easy. All I did was to create an empty VM on the target machine (with the same name as the one I wanted to move), and then copied the VM data files over the top of it. Easy!
I know, I know... the promise of VMs taking over the world is because of exactly this. However, I never really knew how incredibly cool VMs can be. I'll have to try dynamic starting/stopping next, and see how that goes ;-)