Hi,
I'm building a new tech support workstation and will greatly appreciate your advice:
In short, I'm migrating from a 92GB Win7-32bit with only 4GB RAM platform, to a Win8-64bit with 32GB RAM platform. From past experience, I know it will take months of "spare time" until I can finish installing, migrating data, configuring and upgrading all the softwares in Win8 that I need to run my business on a daily basis. In terms of business continuity for now, my thinking is to:
Install a fresh Win8-64bit into a 125GB C: partition on a new 250GB SSD.
Create logical partition D: on the SSD's remaining 125GB.
I'll then P2V the old Win7 into a new VMware VM on the D: partition.
Btw, I'm not seeking methodology on the mechanics of the P2V here, as that is beyond the scope of this post and I know how to do this with VMware products and 3rd party utilities.
This should allow me to:
1. Gradually get the physical Win8 host up and fully provisioned at my convenience, while being able to continue to run Win7 in the VM for my day to day business operations.
2. Enjoy the benefits and productivity features that VMware Workstation provides over the competition.
3. Enjoy the anticipated awesome speed of having the Win7 VM on an SSD.
4. Several months from now when I no longer need the Win7 VM for daily activities, move the Win7 VM off the SSD (over to a SATA III spindle), delete the D: partition off the SSD, and resize the Win8 partition to use the entire SSD.
If I do the migration this way, from Win8 I can do (3rd party) image full /incremental backups of the Win8 C:partition, and Win8 D: partition (which holds the Win7 VM), separately as required based on activity on those partitions. Yes, with the VM shutdown or suspended of course during the 3rd party partition imaging.
So the $64 questions are:
5. Does the above sound like a plan?
6. Or, would it be better to just install Win8 on the entire 250GB SSD space (with VMware Workstation installed of course) and put the Win7 VM on the SATA III spindle that holds my other VMs? My 3rd party imaging software does allow file/directory full/incremental backups, so I could just backup the Win7 VM directory on that spindle. I can see potential disk latency issues in this scenario if I have the old Win7 VM running, and at the same time also be working on (e.g.) two pre-production Windows Server guests with a couple Win7/Win8 guests (for testing some ERP software or MSSQL issue). There'd be five VMs running on that SATA III 7200 rpm spindle.
Sorry this was so lengthy. I look forward to your thoughts and comments.
Regards . . .