Using VMs as Personal DR

Note: This is a brief story where I was forced to sit back and reflect on just how cool this Virtualization stuff really is. Please feel free to disregard however.

Normally I don’t write about the VMware Workstation or hosted products. It just doesn’t happen to be where I spend most of my day. Mind, I use VMware Workstation and VMware Player, but they often “Just Work”. In fact they work well enough that I’ve trusted them to running most of my day to day applications for some time, without much thought.

This weekend presented me an opportunity to reflect on just how awesome desktop virtualization is. I powered my laptop on this Sunday, only to find a bunch of random disk read errors, and other nasty drama on my secondary or “caddy” disk (a secondary disk that sits in a drive caddy where the CD-ROM usually goes).

I pulled the drive out, swapped it into another laptop chassis to do some diagnostics. Well…good news was, the drive was healthy, and the sata controller ate it. Before virtualizaiton, this would have meant spinning up a new laptop, copying files and fiddling settings for hours on end. What it means now however, is I pull down Player 3.0, point it at my disk, and go. Forgetting the fact that the old host was Linux, and the new one Windows. Cool!