This beta of VMWare’s Converter seems like a useful idea, create a converter that will allow you to take a current machine setup, and easily turn it into a virtual machine. The possibilities for using this tool boggle my mind a bit, but I’m sure all you Sys Admin folks out there can come up with more than a few ways for this to be useful. Personally, in the area of desktop support and backup, I can see some situations where this could be really useful, as well as one particular area at work. At any larger law firm you have what we call “floater” secretaries, who fill in on secretarial assignments that are not staffed due to illness, vacations or staff shortages. Typically in our office, each of these “floaters” have a desktop machine that is set-up for them to use, and then when they are at the different assignments, they use Remote Desktop Connection to work from that desktop PC rather than having to reconfigure each workstation for them to use. I’m thinking there could be some real hardware savings if we could convert some of those desktops into virtual machines that could be accessed by RDC just the same, and some real time savings in supporting them, with mutliple virtual machines running in one central place, as opposed to hooked into the network all over the place!

Of course, that’s not all this converter does, it also converts from earlier VMWare formats as well as other virtual machine formats, like VirtualPC. Pretty nifty.

Hat tip to Download Squad, who also have a link to LiveCD Player Virtual Machine. If you’ve used either of these tools, let us know what you think!

This entry was posted on Monday, October 30th, 2006 at 7:59 pm and is filed under IT, Mike McBride. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.