Today I’ve been working for a client doing some restructuring of their servers. We’ve been taking a number of servers that were on physical hardware and virtualising them. To do that I’ve used ShadowProtect from Storagecraft. It’s a wonderful product and one that I’ve had for some years now. One of the cool things that I am using it for today is to take an image of a physical server down to a USB drive, then I’m taking the USB drive to the new Hyper-V server and restoring the image into a virtualised environment. I setup the new Virtual Machine the way I wanted it with 4 CPU and 4GB of RAM and then booted the Virtual machine from the ShadowProtect CD. Booting was extremely slow and even moving around inside the environment was very slow too. Initially I didn’t think much of it as I was also copying a large amount of data over to the Hyper-V machines hard drives, however when I started to restore a 40GB image from the USB drive, it told me that it was restoring at 1Mb/second and therefore it was going to take hours to restore… Hmm – very strange for this to happen. I had a thought and on a hunch, I reduce the number of CPU’s in the Virtual machine to just 1. I booted up of the ShadowProtect CD and wow – what a difference. The speed was at least 10 times faster now and the restore screamed through in record time.
Morale to the story – don’t try to get too far ahead of yourself.