VMware Pocket ACE: Another Marathon Process
I don't want this blog to just focus on computing processes that take forever (e.g., my last couple of SpinRite posts). But, here's another one. This time I'm playing with VMware Workstation 6 and its ACE/Pocket ACE add-on. ACE lets you take a VMware virtual machine image and deploy it with full enterprise policy controls to multiple targets. Pocket ACE takes this one step further by letting you deploy a VM with an installed Guest OS to a portable storage device such as a USB flash drive, iPod, or portable USB hard drive. The idea is that you can take this device, plug it in to a Windows or Linux PC, and run your virtual environment from the portable device without installing anything on the host PC.
So, I built a Fedora 7 virtual machine using VMware Workstation 6 with ACE. I fully patched the relatively small system and installed one application (Mozilla Thunderbird 2.0.6 with my email profile in an account). After doing that, I created a deployable ACE configuration (all wizard driven). Finally, I plugged in a USB hard drive and started the Pocket ACE deployment process. That was over three hours ago. As you can see from my screen shot, it is maybe at the 10% mark at this point. I'm going to leave it running overnight and see how far it gets.
Now, the PC I'm testing this on is just a single core Athlon 64-bit CPU running Windows Vista (32-bit version) Ultimate Edition. Still, this seems awfully slow to me. Will it take 30 hours to complete? I hope not. Stay tuned to yet another TO-Tech marathon process.
UPDATE: It turns out that while VMware Pocket ACE's deployment process is slow, it is not as glacial as I originally thought. It looks like Pocket ACE didn't like the external hard drive I used to test it initially. I tried it a couple more times and watched it progress to different levels (all the way up to 40% on one test) and then lock up. I connected a Western Digital MyBook external drive and Pocket ACE was able to deploy my Fedora 7 Linux VM to it in about an hour (still slow but better than overnight). I'm not sure what it doesn't like about the first hard drive (an old 40GB drive in a Coolmax HD-360 USB enclosure). My first thought was that the drive couldn't handle sustained large file copies. However, I copied over two VMware Workstation ACE VM directories (10.9 GB of files) and everything copied over fine.
November 4th, 2008 - 11:49
Well, I have been on a quest to find the best USB devices for deploying pocket ACE packages….with the advent of 16G and 32G units, carrying around a “computer in a pocket” that has some utility has been real….
I am glad to have found at least one other mention of the issue with the deployment process…I spent 18 hours waiting for deployment of my 16GB image…that is insane. Copying the equivalent amount of files is comparably instantaneous….
Hopefully VMWare will eventually address this…
July 9th, 2009 - 04:13
I read somewhere that this is some kind of NTFS issue – someone formatted the USB stick as FAT32 and it was much faster to deploy the pocket ACE package.
September 5th, 2009 - 10:08
Yep.. I deployed Windows 7 to a 16GB CorasirGT and the whole thing went down in a couple of hours.. I would say that’s much faster than the 18 hours experience.. but still awfull slow considering the drive’s capabilities (same amout of data copies normally in about 10 minutes).
I’m sure there’s more to this Pocket ACE than meets the eye.