Movin on Up: Converting a VDI to a VHD to move from VirtualBox to Azure

By -
Months (years?) behind the rest of the world, I've finally decided it's time to get my VMs up to Azure (no more SSD swapping between PC and laptop despite having a easily mountable caddy in my work laptop and this sweet caddy in my PC.

As a loyal VirtualBox user I opted for VDI rather than VHD, but now I must convert.  So here's what I did:

  1. Uninstall VBox Guest Additions from the VM
  2. Shut the VM down (don't save the state).
  3. Remove the VDI from the Virtual Media Manager in Virtual box before running the command below
  4. Run the following command using Run As Administrator by right-clicking on the command prompt (from the VBox Install directory unless you've set the PATH variable):  VBoxManage clonehd e:\SP2013DEV.vdi  c:\SP2013DEVaz.vhd --format VHD

    In the above command the first file is the source VDI the second is the destination VHD.
  5. Wait for the magic to happen it should take a while since VMs with SP on them are pretty big.  Going from one drive to another should help a bit.
  6. Upload to Azure and config a new VM to use that VHD.
  7. Profit
I ran into a hiccup in that it appears my vbox installation got messed up during an upgrade and kept telling me that VBoxManage was not a vaild win32 application because it was a zero byte file.   Reinstalling VBox did the trick.

I may go to just configuring straight in Azure from now on. I do like the option of building locally then uploading, but I will probably just start with the VHD format from now on since conversion is really just an extra step if you plan on going to Azure.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

ERROR: Failed to create feature receiver...

By -
I was working on a STSDev project which deployed a feature with a feature receiver. I had the feature working without the FeatureReceiver but as soon as I added the FeatureReceiver related attributes to my <Feature> element I got the following error: Failed to create feature receiver object from assembly "Org.Project.Solution, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=c632353d405b3209", type "Org.Project.Solution.MyFeature.FeatureReceiver" for feature 6a9b2358-ea4e-486d-a4e4-4f813c52ce88: System.ArgumentNullException: Value cannot be null. Parameter name: type at System.Activator.CreateInstance(Type type, Boolean nonPublic) at System.Activator.CreateInstance(Type type) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPFeatureDefinition.get_ReceiverObject() After much digging around I discovered that STSDEV's Solution config file refers to a namespace as well as the dll. My FeatureReceiver's namespace was not prefixed with the right namespace So just
Read more

Programmatically Update Page Layouts

By -
I updated my page layouts that I deployed as a feature, but found that I could not overwrite the Layout File. The solution was to add a new page layout and then you would have to associate the new layout with every page on your site that used it. Obviously with a site of any size you'd have a lot of manual work to get this done, so doing it programmatically makes for a much better (and thorough) approach. After you've got your new page layouts, you could do something like this (in your event receiver class): public override void FeatureActivated(SPFeatureReceiverProperties properties) { //replace current page layouts with new page layouts on all pages SPWeb web = SPContext.Current.Web; SwapPageLayout(web, "FullWidthContentWithTitleV1.aspx", "FullWidthContentWithTitleV2.aspx"); } private void SwapPageLayout(SPWeb web, string oldPageLayoutName, string newPageLayoutName) { PublishingWeb pubWeb = PublishingWeb.GetPu
Read more