VMWare Converter

Two days ago my notebook hard disk drive started failing... or at least the system seems to have stopped the disk (while I was away) and after I reset the system S.M.A.R.T. message appeared warning me of imminent disk failure and urging me to backup the data immediately. I have all my correspondence on that notebook but that's not the problem - the problem is that I have Office there and IM there and Skype and that I didn't (and still don't) want to pollute my development PCs with all those applications. While I was researching my options I stumbled upon VMWare Converter which turned out to be just what the doctor ordered: I used the application to convert the physical PC to a virtual OS image on my main development PC. The conversion process took almost 48 hours to finish (I had to restart the conversion process at one point due to network router reset) but it was worth it - I now have my notebook's image running on the development PC and it's working really great.

So VMWare Converter is pretty cool product as it is but here's my wish list for it:
1. Allow virtual machine to physical machine conversions! This is crucial. With this the circle would be complete allowing in my case for example to transfer back my notebook OS image to new hard disk drive once it's installed. It can be done (google for "VMWare V2P" without the quotes or see here) but not directly from the software and using 3rd party tools only (for hard disk image transfer)
2. Extend the software so that it can used as an incremental backup tool. Instead of backing up parts of hard disk, one would backup the entire system as a virtual OS image and VMWare would in future backups correctly recognize and backup just the changed parts. Then if the original PC say gets broken, lost, stolen, whatever one could be up and running the same image (as it was backed up) immediately.
3. Allow selection of parts of hard disks to be backed up. There are folders that contain huge amounts of data that doesn't really matter or is backed up somewhere else and which takes precious time during the conversion process.
4. In the case of network failure, conversion process is not reset but resumed once network comes up again (this was the only major annoyance but it was really *major* and it could have been avoided rather easily I think)
5. Allow VMWare Converter to be licensed on its own. Right now there is the free version and the Enterprise version which cannot be licensed on its own but one has to licenses who-knows-what to get it.

Once I get my notebook back I may dare and try Virtual 2 Physical (V2P) conversion. If I do, I'll post the results here. Somehow I have a feeling that it won't be as nearly as smooth as Physical 2 Virtual (P2V) conversion.

Turn AUTO_SHRINK off!!

Paul Randal (Principal Lead Program Manager, SQL Storage Engine) over at SQL Server Storage Engine blog, has posted today on why everybody should turn AUTO_SHRINK off for their production dbs. He enumerates three reasons why AUTO_SHRINK should be turned off. He's an authority on the SQL Server Storage Engine so I would heed what he says.

I have however one more reason to add: in case of catastrophic data loss (either through db corruption, DELETE without WHERE, DROP TABLE or TRUNCATE TABLE) from which you can't recover by restoring a backup (either because you don't have it or you don't have up to date transaction log backups or whatever), you really really *really* don't want SQL Server going in and shrinking the database files before you had a chance to recover the data. What you want to do instead is:
1. Put database in read-only mode immediately so that it's left in the state as close as possible to the state it was in in the moment of the data loss (if you experienced a hardware failure or something such your db files are now detached - just leave them like that for now)
2. Download ApexSQL Log and install it. If you need to analyze a database that's online install ApexSQL Log's server-side components on the server. It doesn't matter if you have or don't have transaction logs for the database - the application will try to recover data from what you have (besides, transaction logs can help only with the recovery of delete data)
3. Run ApexSQL Log's Recovery Wizard and chose the recovery option most adequate for the scenario. Recovery Wizard will recover all the data (including BLOB) it can still find in the database and create a recovery script.
4. Run recovery script on another database to check the data. If everything is fine - great! If there's a problem or you think that the software should have recovered more data, please contact us at support@apexsql.com and we will help you out.

On Technical Support

At ApexSQL we strive to give the best possible technical support we can. Brian (my boss) already blogged on this in Support Engineer Creed. I'm writing this to give my thanks to all those people in all these years that have put their trust in us. It gives me great joy to be daily talking to you, our customers, and I love being able to help you (and I feel bad when I can't.) Thank you.

Chileno!

Hoy recibí el comunicado oficial de mi ciudanania Chilena. Las palabras no me bastan para expresar la felcidad y la gratitud que siento.

Danas sam primio zvanicno obavestenje o mom Cileanskom drzavljanstvu. Reci mi nisu dovoljne da izdrazim srecu i zahvalnost koju osecam.

Today I have received the official notice of my Chilean citizenship. Words fail me to express the happiness and the gratitude I feel.

Upcoming ApexSQL Log 2005.04

We are in the final stages of releasing ApexSQL Log 2005.04 to our QA team. In the previous versions the bulk of improvements were in 64-bit support and in recovery process while auditing has sort of taken a backseat. But this upcoming version will bring some very serious improvements on the auditing end, especially with the infamous (at least in our little world of transaction log auditing) UPDATE reconstruction problem (which has been a very exciting problem to solve, in a geekish sort of way of course :) I invite those that weren't very happy with UPDATE auditing in the past to check it out once the new version is out. Beside this we have further improved BLOB recovery process (adding full support for new VAR*(MAX) types in SQL Server 2005) and we generally improved reliability, performance and memory footprint. All in all, I hope this new version will be a real boon for our customers.

Digital Blasphemy

As I mentioned couple of weeks ago I switched to two 1,600 x 1,200 screens. I can't say enough good things about that - it's just marvelous for productivity. However, with so much screen real estate the bland default background of Windows 2003 Server gets boring very quickly. So I set about to search for alternatives. I have known about Digital Blasphemy site for a long time and while I like the images very much it never attracted me so much as to subscribe to it - my screen was always too cluttered with too many windows to appreciate a great looking desktop background. This time however it was different and with a lot of great images provided for 3,200 x 1,200 I was hooked. I subscribed for a year and if it works out good for me I'll go with lifetime subscription next year.

Check out the site for yourself and see if you like it. All the art is created by just one guy, Ryan Bliss, and he's behind the site as well. You can check more about him here.