by
Jack Madden
As a follow-up to my visit with Wanova a while ago, I spent a bit of time with Mirage 3.0. There’s a lot that Mirage can do that I didn’t take advantage of, but I did get a good feel for how it works.
Basically, I had an old netbook laying around, so when I got my hands on Mirage (Wanova set me up with an instance hosted on Amazon EC2) I figured I’d migrate it to a virtual machine. I installed the Mirage client, modified the default upload policy a little bit, and then uploaded it and created a CVD (Centralized Virtual Desktop—Wanova’s term for the disk images that Mirage works with).
The old netbook:
While Mirage allows you to transfer a Windows 7 image to bare metal (using a USB boot key that you create), I had to transfer my XP image into an existing machine. In this case I used a plain-vanilla VM running in VMware Fusion.
The plain-vanilla VM (while I was synching it to Mirage):
What I did was fairly ham-fisted, because I dumped the whole image from my physical netbook into the VM without any changes. If I wanted to be more elegant about it I could have used Mirage to export all the drivers from the existing VM and then apply them to the image from the netbook. But the cool part was that it all worked anyway, netbook drivers and all.
The resulting virtual machine:
And that’s pretty much it. Everything went smoothly, but as you can see in my video with Ady Degany, there’s a lot more that Mirage does than just a simple P to V migration—I was just barely scraping the surface.
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