Virtual Server 2005 R2 kungfu

Posted by AngryHacker on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by AngryHacker
Published on 2011-01-05T17:18:08Z Indexed on 2011/01/05 17:55 UTC
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Does Virtual Server 2005 R2 have a command line interface, that's versatile enough?

Here is a situation. I run a Win2k VM on an old memory constrained machine. I allocate it 378MB of RAM and the VM runs just fine. Once a month, inside the VM, I backup the (a very large) database, compress it using 7Zip and ftp it to the backup site (all in a script).

Unfortunately the compression part takes a massive amount of RAM (far exceeding the 378MB), it goes for the paging file and brings absolutely everything to a crawl and literally takes 2-3 days, if left unattended. So to fix this, I have to shutdown the VM, give it temporarily 768MB of RAM and then the whole thing finishes in 20 minutes.

So, is there a way do the following automatically from the host machine in a script?

  1. Shutdown the guest OS (I think, I got this part)
  2. Change the RAM allocation from 378 to 768
  3. Start the guest OS again

then, 1 hour later, do everything in reverse.

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