vSekar Blog

We will be focusing on creating this masterpiece in the Windows environment, but don’t worry the same principles can be used in any operating system that can run Virtual Box.

List of Software and Hardware needed:

Software:

-Virtual Box and Extension Pack

-Windows 7 or higher PC or most any Linux Distro

-Redo Backup and Recovery ISO

-YUMI installer

Hardware:

-USB flash drive

-USB hard drive

The overall benefits of performing this procedure is three fold. One, cost savings on power, climate control and space required will be seen instantly. Two, manageability and scalability dramatically increases due to working with virtual disks and virtual networks that can scaled up or down with finer grained control. Three, redundancy and faster disaster recovery that is provided by cloud services. Especially when tied into your already existing network infrastructure for a seamless transition when disaster strikes.

While this process can be completed in numerous ways with different software, this is the way that I am familiar with and all the tools needed are free.

Sounds daunting? No sweat, but where do we start first?

Well, we need to get an image of the physical machine onto removable media (USB hard drive). I recommend a USB hard drive vs. just a USB flash drive due to the space the image will take up. We will also need a USB flash drive at least 2 GB in size to use as a bootable media for Redo Backup and Recovery.

Plug the USB hard drive into your USB port and open up the folder structure. Create a folder in a location that you can remember I.e D:”Your Computer’s Name”. This is the location where we will install the files from our initial physical image copy to. After this is complete, eject your USB hard drive by right clicking on the “Safely Remove Hardware” icon in your taskbar and click on Eject “whatever your USB hard drive is named”, unplug the USB HDD.

Next, we need to create a bootable USB to load Redo Backup and Recovery on. Download a small program called “YUMI”. YUMI will create a bootable USB flash drive for Redo Backup and Recovery on it. Also grab a copy of Redo Backup and Recovery, save both files to your desktop or location of choice.

Now, run YUMI and choose your USB flash drive from the list (Remember to choose your USB drive and not your USB HDD that should be unplugged anyway!). Choose “Redo Backup and Recovery” from the software list that you can create an installer for. Click the “Browse” button to look for the Redo Backup and Recovery.iso to include on the install. Finally click on “create” to start the bootable Redo Backup and Recovery bootable USB creation process. When this is done, YUMI will ask you if you want to add any more distros, just say “no”. Eject your USB out of the computer using the “Safely Remove Hardware” icon in your taskbar and click on Eject “whatever your USB flash drive is named” and unplug the USB flash drive. Please keep Redo Backup and Recovery.iso we will need it later.

Make sure that the physical computer that you would like to virtualize is in a powered down state, if not please power down the computer. Insert only the USB flash drive into the computer. Power up the computer and press the correct key to access to boot menu or make sure that the USB drive is set to boot before the computers internal hard drive. Choose the USB entry to boot from, YUMI should now load. Choose the entry for “Tools” then “Redo Backup and Recovery”. Press enter on the Redo menu to start the mini recovery O/S. When Redo Backup and Recovery is loaded, insert your USB HDD and give it about 20 seconds.

Open Redo Backup and Recovery Software:

1. Choose “Backup”

2. Choose your disk to backup (your physical computer’s disk)

3. Choose your partitions to backup (typically it would be all partitions and MBR)

4. On the “Destination Drive” screen choose “Connected directly to my computer” and click browse.

5. Locate the file folder we made earlier I.e D:”Your Computer’s Name” click OK.

6. Choose a name for the disk image. I will usually choose the date, click next. The backup process will take anywhere from 1 hr to 3 hrs depending on hard drive capacity and computer speed.

Congratulations, at this point you have made a full backup of your physical machine. Please click “Close” on the Redo and Recovery Backup program and choose the power button in the bottom right corner of your screen. Select “Shutdown” and let the computer shutdown. Remove both USB flash drive and USB HDD and boot up any computer that has Windows 7 or higher installed on it.

Now, lets turn that physical machine into a virtual machine!

Open up Virtual Box and choose “New”. Give your Virtual Machine a name and choose the type of virtual machine it will be as well as the version. Choose your memory size, I usually a lot 2 GB=2048 MB if I plan on running it on a machine that has 4 GB of ram physically installed. Create a new hard drive, choose VHD as the hard drive file type, click next. Choose “Dynamically allocated” for the storage, click next. Give your VHD hard drive a name, I will usually name it by whats running on it, hence name it what you named your computer. Make the VHD hard drive large enough to store your operating system, I will usually choose 200GB to be on the safe side. Again this depends on how big your physical machine’s data was. You are now returned to the Virtual Box Manager screen with your new VM present. Make sure your Virtual Box extension has been installed. Obtain the extension for your software version and install it like so:

In Virtual Box, click File–>Preferences–>Extensions–>Add Package–>Locate extension file and select it. It will be automatically installed.

Prepare the conversion! Use only Option A or Option B:

Option A: If you can get USB support working in Virtual Box:

Make sure that you have installed the extension pack and setup USB access properly, if you are having some troubles, refer to the Virtual Box document here:

https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch03.html#idp55342960

In Virtual Box, click on your VM name and choose “Settings” at the top, choose “Storage”. Click on the empty CD/DVD icon and then the CD/DVD icon on the right under “Attributes” and select your Redo Backup and Recovery ISO and click “OK”. At this point you have the Redo Backup and Recovery.iso at the ready and a blank VHD to install to. All you need to do now is insert your USB hard drive and skip over Option B because you do not need to perform it.

Option B: If you cannot get USB support to work in Virtual Box. No problem, its what happened to me so I found a way around it.

In Virtual Box, click on your VM name and choose “Settings” at the top, choose “Storage”, choose “Add hard disk” next to Controller:Sata or Controller:IDE whatever you have. Choose “Create new disk”, choose VHD and again make it 200GB Dynamically allocated and name it “Installer”. Underneath “Storage Tree” click on the empty CD/DVD icon and then the CD/DVD icon on the right under “Attributes” and select your Redo Backup and Recovery ISO and click “OK”. At this point you have the Redo Backup and Recovery.iso at the ready and a blank VHD which is named after your computer and another black VHD named Installer. Now close Virtual Box and right click on “Computer” and choose “Manage”. Left click on “Disk Management” then right click on “Disk Management” again and choose “Attach VHD”. Browse for the location of your Installer VHD that you created in Virtual Box, usually in the “My Documents” folder and click okay. Now you can copy the physical computer backup image that we took earlier from D:”Your Computer’s Name” to Installer VHD. After the contents have been copied, right click on computer management again and click on “Detach VHD”. Open up Virtual Box and proceed to the next step.

Lets Convert This Thing!

Once you have either USB support or the Installer VHD setup and the Redo Backup and Recovery ISO mounted. Press “Start” on your VM name in Virtual Box. You will be met the familiar Redo Backup and Recovery boot menu, press enter to proceed. Launch the Backup and Recovery program if it did not start automatically. Choose “Restore”. In a nutshell, you will choose where your Image backup is “The Source Drive” (your USB HDD or Installer VHD if applicable) and where to install the image (blank VHD named after your computer). After you have chosen to install into the blank VHD, confirm the prompt to overite any data and let the recovery process begin. After this is finished, click close and shutdown Backup and Recovery as you did before. The VM should stop running. Click on “Settings” from the Virtual Box Manager and unmount the Backup and Recovery ISO and the Installer VHD if applicable. Leave your VHD with the name of your computer or whatever you named it and click on “OK” to go back to the Virtual Box Manager. Click on “Start”, you should now be looking at a fully virtualized version of your physical computer!

Celebrate the many uses of this power little VHD!

You can transport this VHD and include it in any Virtual Box VM instance or even VMware if you are so inclined. You can run it on your local premises or deploy it in the cloud. A cloud instance of this VM would either require running Virtual Box on your cloud computing instance, or running it natively in your cloud computing space if the hosting provider supports it.

Common Gotchas and Troubleshooting:

Q: When trying to run my Linux based virtual machine, I get ” not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0) “?

A: This is because in the backup and recovery process all the entries for hda##, hdb## and so forth have been converted to sda## extc. First, copy your precious VHD so you won’t lose your work if something goes wrong. Then all you will have to do is mount Backup and Recovery ISO, start your VM again and bring up a terminal session. Mount the Root partition and edit the entries in GRUB or Lilo to the proper boot device. For example: in GRUB, the entries are included in menu.Ist and fstab. In Lilo they are included in /etc/lilo.config and then /sbin/lilo -v to write the changes.

Q: When trying to run my Windows based virtual machine I get a boot error?

A: Obtain a copy or a Windows disc and mount it inside of Virtual Box making sure it is set to boot first. Choose the “Repair” option. Choose “Start Up Repair” and let it run. If this does not do the trick, go back into the “Repair” option and choose “Command Prompt”. Try these commands one at a time, shutting down and unmounting the Windows disc each time to check if the problem has been corrected:

bootrec.exe /FixMbr. Then restart to see if resolved. If no result, try:

bootrec.exe /FixBoot. Then restart to see if resolved. If no result, try:

bootrec.exe /RebuildBcd. Then restart to see if resolved. If no result, try:

You may have to remove your BCD folder by running these commands one line at a time without quotes:

“bcdedit /export C:BCD_Backup

c: <—- Only if your Windows installation is installed on C:

cd boot

attrib bcd -s -h -r

ren c:bootbcd bcd.old

bootrec /RebuildBcd”

Source by David T Goodwin

People today store all their information in computers, even backing up date to cloud servers. This leaves the information extremely vulnerable to attack and theft. Businesses, government, and educational institutions need software that protects their data, such as McAfee Support.

McAfee provides protection for all kinds of users. They offer products for home and home office, enterprise organizations with more than 250 employees, small businesses with under 250 employees, and partnership opportunities.

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McAfee Real Time identifies the device or devices requiring remediation. Next they streamline the response, enabling automated investigation across all endpoints resulting in a cost-effective solution.

McAfee also offers a Data Center Suite which provides elastic security for hybrid data centers. This addresses enterprises’ growing need to leverage scalability and cost savings of running workloads in public clouds like Amazon Web Services. This is helpful when workloads are move to the cloud and they want to know their data is protected.

Organizations can discover all workloads including those from VMware’s vCenter to provide the security administrator with complete visibility of the security status. McAfee accomplishes that by protecting every physical and virtual machine in the hybrid-data center. This occurs with a fine-grained policy management and data center trust attestation with easy manageability.

McAfee looks to expand compute capacity securely into the cloud. They ensure identical security posture between on-premise and cloud-based machines. The McAfee Data Center optimizes security, flexibility, and manageability of virtual movements. It produces a simplified security solution for companies investing in virtualization for data centers, applications, and desktops.

McAfee also is known as one of the leading companies offering Web gateway solutions that utilize URL filtering, malware detection, application control technology to protect organizations, and enforce internet policy compliance.

The McAfee Web Protection solution offers the advanced security, control, and malware protection organizations need to take full advantage of the web. This is combined with the flexibility to have on premises or cloud based Web protection with McAfee’s singular solution. Their comprehensive web security is provided completely regardless of location or device.

McAfee is known as an innovative company for partnering with the industry’s leading technology distributors to offer its embedded security solutions. More companies will be able to offer McAfee’s comprehensive web solutions, giving more enterprises access to the best-of web protection. Their three main themes are safety, security, and ultra-low power.

Source by Stuart Maskell

Cloud computing experts are often extremely conversational, and can’t wait to tell you about how the cloud is going to help YOU. Ian Moyse, a renowned cloud expert caught our eye a few months ago for his involvement in many large IT events held in the UK. He’s also a keynote speaker, and many of Ian’s presentations can be found online. We were interested in the changes in cloud computing Ian has observed in the last decade; and rightly so. Ian has been a part of the cloud transition and seen it from various perspectives, including email spam security. “Stopping spam is easy, ensuring you don’t stop any of the good mail as well, that’s the tricky part.” Here’s our full interview with Ian Moyse:

How are you utilizing the cloud?

“Personally I use the cloud for a mix of reasons. I utilize mobile access to data and files using a mix of Box.net, Dropbox and Microsoft Skydrive. Why not, I get a lot more free storage and no inconvenience; as it’s all simple and widely accessible, I use cloud email and access it from multiple devices, I have a home private cloud storage using Pogoplug and I use Google Apps to share personal documents when needed. Often, in fact, I find I am using a system or application without realizing it’s cloud, or caring until I stop and think how they are doing that. It’s becoming second nature to just use what works and makes your daily life easier, and with so many software as a service offerings being immediately accessible through an entry level freemium model. I think we shall see an increase in this just do it thought pattern as this type of offering becomes more predominant. In business we of course use our own cloud CRM Workbooks, our email is hosted Exchange and we utilize Google Apps and Box.net on a daily basis. It has allowed us to grow rapidly and focus on the job at hand, and not on running infrastructure for our own business and ending up in break/fix mode. We run much more efficiently than I have seen in other non-clouded businesses, and we certainly have more availability and an easier life when mobile.”

What is your opinion of the major cloud providers? I.e. Amazon’s AWS, Windows Azure, others.

“The fact that we have such major vendors promoting and providing open cloud platforms for all to utilize, and investing so heavily in these demonstrates where the market is, and is going. Amazon has led the way and Microsoft is following. As one reduces pricing, we see the other react. This is good for customers building on these platforms, and the customers they are delivering cloud service onto, as this will drive more affordable solutions and innovation in our industry, which in turn stimulates activity, purchase, revenue, and thus, employment and other benefits. We shall continue to see more innovation and new startups appearing offering solutions off of the back of these more affordable and quicker-to-market platforms. Those looking for solutions need to also consider that there are also other localized providers available who can be engaged effectively and not limit their choice to only the big cloud names. We have also seen the bigger names having some issues along the way with Microsoft Azure having outages, several of which caused by expired security certificates at Microsoft. What the big names are doing is setting the scene and building awareness, driving market acceptance and opportunity for more than just themselves.”

How has cloud computing changed the enterprise security landscape?

“Cloud has changed the battlefront for many aspects of security. It has enabled the defenders to have far greater power and security intelligence at hand and in real time to battle against the increased volume and speed of threats coming from the internet. It has enabled new methods of malware detection to be borne as seen from the approaches of FireEye and Webroot and it has bought new vendors to the forefront. With a massive increase in mobile devices and consumerisation, the need to protect anywhere, anytime, any device has been enabled by cloud solutions and with the beauty of cloud comes the fact that many of these cloud security solutions can be utilized and afforded by the mid-market and smaller business, enabling them to take benefit of the same protection levels as the enterprise client, after all they are under attack by the same threats. Previously, many security based products were by the definition of their cost too expensive and complex to deploy for the average business so these smaller companies (of which make up most of the market) were left with less than adequate protection. Now they can afford and utilize easy to switch on, highly accurate, and protective cloud based security to protect their business assets and employees.”

Any specific recommendations when it comes to security and server monitoring in a Cloud environment like Windows Azure? (Aside from reminding Microsoft to renew its SSL certs on time… )

“I think here it’s for the vendors to realize that delivering a cloud service has far higher expectations than individuals on network solutions, customer expectations are higher, SLA’s need to be higher as one of the value propositions of the cloud and the capability to deliver to these demands that you ensure a robust, accurate and responsive monitoring system. Get it wrong in the cloud and the effect is far quicker and widespread than on network. Get it right and the availability, resilience, security and flexibility is far greater.”

Storage and server requirements may grow exponentially as companies begin aggregating data. How are server monitoring tools keeping up with these demands?

“Of course as cloud server deployments grow so does the industry around them for new tools and approaches. There are a wealth of server monitoring tools available with a growth marketspace driving more function and resilience for less price. Whereas historically we would have expected a turn to the CA’s, BMC, NetIQ’s of this world there are now a wider choice of newer names to consider. Appdynamics, for example and Nimsoft (now under CA ownership), Hiperic from VMware and solutions such as Abiquo who deliver, not just the management tools.”

Can you tell us about the most interesting web scalability project you’ve been a part of? (Number of servers, data/traffic being handled, etc.)

“I guess the most interesting and challenging space of cloud for unpredictability was email security. Stopping that dreaded spam, Denial of Service attacks and unpredictable mass mailing in and out of customers. In the early 2000’s I was involved at Blackspider, a pioneering technology firm (now the foundation of the Websense hosted security platforms) who built one of the early Software as a Service email filtering solutions. We had to handle masses of mail volume with unpredictable volumes and spikes in a cost effective and highly accurate way. Stopping spam is easy, ensuring you don’t stop any of the good mail as well, that’s the tricky part. Customers demanded not only the blocking of spam, phishing emails and the like, but consistency of getting the good stuff through accurately. The pressure was always on in that to switch cloud Email filtering services is easy requiring only a switch of MX records so customers could truly move relatively quickly and easily should a provider fail to keep high standards. The malicious email market in those days was also pioneering for the attackers so we saw far more changes in their behavior and were developing new detection approaches as the market matured. Today email security in the cloud is pretty standard with many players in the market having been acquired into larger vendors such as Messagelabs into Symantec, Blackspider into Websense and more recently Isheriff into Total Defense and Maildistiller into Proofpoint. We also see the hosted email providers including it as a standard service (Google using their acquired Postini and Microsoft their acquired Frontbridge services).”

Any projects you’d like to plug, or trends you’re particularly excited about?

“Cloud is driving incredible opportunity for innovators and whilst there are some big brand names dominating in the relevant markets such as platforms, security, email and CRM for example there remains a massive opportunity for other players. Take CRM for example where Salesforce and Microsoft are two big brands with offerings, they are not right for everyone and often are too complex and expensive for the small to mid market company. At Workbooks we have innovated and are seeing a lot of customers choosing us over these systems and moving to us from them, finding we have delivered something they have not at a far reduced cost. Cloud enables more leveled competition to play and will drive increased choice for customers and a reduction in cost empowering smaller businesses in themselves to utilize more effective computing power to enable them to compete more effectively in their own given markets.”

How does your team monitor servers to ensure that you are delivering a reliable service to your customers?

“We have remote server monitoring to all components of our service across multiple datacentres, allowing us to identify faults before they effect customers and to respond rapidly where required to any hardware failures that can happen to anyone, even a cloud provider. The key being that we have the resilience and hardening in the system that most customers could not afford to build themselves, and should any component fail it fails over to another device allowing us the time to respond and replace without clients being effected. This is how we have consistently delivered over 99.9% availability, and in fact for a good long period have delivered 100% to clients a feat few can boast of with on network CRM and contact managements solutions. We have picked up many clients recently who have moved from these legacy systems such as Goldmine and ACT having experienced outages of hardware and local failures, one having been out for over a week whilst their provider replaced hardware and re-configured their system to get it back up and live.”

What are the challenges you face when scaling a few cloud servers to hundreds of servers? What are your thoughts on these challenges?

“If you have laid the foundations well and planned to scale from the start,. as any experienced and good cloud provider will have done, then this is no issue. Unfortunately in the cloud space there are many who have undertaken the building of their 1st hosted solution and ‘do not know what they don’t know’ and may find themselves having to re-architect or re-engineer down the line which gets really difficult once you have reached a certain scale. There are many who are already in this situation as larger cloud providers and have to keep bolting onto their foundation, finding a re-start too complex, costly and long a project. This is the 3rd cloud system our founders have successfully built going back over 14 years. Finding a cloud provider who has the inherent experience at their core is a great asset to the choice customers can make for the longevity.”

Ian Moyse, Sales Director at Workbooks.com a Cloud CRM vendor, has over 25 years of experience in the IT Sector, he sits on the board of Eurocloud UK and the Governance Board of the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF), was listed in top 25 of the worldwide SMB Nation 150 Channel Influencers list in both 2012 and 2013 and named by TalkinCloud as one of the global top 200 cloud channel experts in 2011.

Source by Craig Ferril