Provided by ArtinSoft, a lead company on the development of migration solutions; this blog is dedicated to information technologies in general. I joined this company on July 2006 as a contractor and I work as a professional trainer on information technologies, mostly for Microsoft's virtualization solutions and ArtinSoft's migration technologies.

November 2006 - Posts

• Acronis P2V/V2P

  There are news from Acronis on their "introduction" to the P2V scenario, and the quotes only mean that this is definitely not unexplored territory for them. Acronis True Image is a tool that helps you create a full backup of your hard disks. It is intended to be used for backup and recovery of your systems, but for years now, lots of IT administrators out there have found an alternative use for it, P2V. Although it wasn't meant to be used with this purpose specifically, it can certainly help do the trick. P2V stands for Physical To Virtual conversion and the idea is that in order to explode part of the benefits of virtual machines, you must not only be able to create new VMs from scratch but also take your existing workloads and move them into a virtualized environment and back. In the past if Acronis True Image was the weapon of choice for you to complete this task, then there are good news for you. Acronis has announced that a new product called Full Circle will be released this year, and although it holds all of the benefits for image cloning that you know and like, this product is specifically intended to fit your P2V needs, and as its name hints it, your V2P (virtual to physical) requirements as well. It supports both 32-bit and 64-bit x86 hardware, virtualization software from VMware, Microsoft, Xen, Parallels and SWSoft, and Windows and Linux guests, which makes it a very complete and universal proposal. This product will be made available in December, no word on pricing yet. Read more about Acronis Full Circle here. Posted Nov 20 2006, 09:32 PM by smurillo with no comments

• Seamless Remote Windows

  Making a remote desktop connection to a server just to run a single application is a very common situation. It is true you can configure a connection to log on automatically and even launch the desired application. For example you could specify the username, password and Notepad as the application to launch. But once you connect you get the same old Remote Desktop Connection window with just Notepad inside, which is still disruptive. Imagine if you could see a remote window as if it was running locally, resize it, move it and close it just like a regular window. This feature is included in RDP 6.0, but if you want to try it without upgrading your system first, then you can access this article on the Code Project website. For developers out there this is a great introduction to the Remote Desktop Protocol, and for those who are not interested on getting to understand the protocol, you can just download the application from the author Martin Wickett on 2005. Posted Nov 17 2006, 02:52 PM by smurillo with no comments

• Sysprep User Profiles

  There are times when you would want to Sysprep a Windows image and get it ready to join a domain and start creating user profiles. But what if you want to control the configurations and contents of those future profiles? Windows offers a location for a Default User Profile. It is a hidden folder normally located in %SystemDrive%\Documents And Settings\Default User. To create a default profile all you need to do is log in to the machine, make all the changes you need and then log off. Once you are done copy all the contents of your profile folder to the Default User folder. You will need to do this offline or by using another account. Profiles folders contain a file called NTUSER.DAT, this file contains all the configurations that are located in the HKEY_CURRENT_USER registry entry when the respective user logs on. In general all of this works for future profiles even if you are not using Sysprep. But when you do use Sysprep there is a particular case that is not contemplated here. When you set the machine to log in the first time using a particular user account, the contents of that local profile will be copied to the Default User Profile that first time. In those cases you should set the defaults using that account. Posted Nov 10 2006, 05:42 PM by smurillo with no comments