[Cialug] making VM images faster

[Dave Hala Jr]

I've been converting some existing servers to VirtualBox VM's by
rebooting them into single user mode, mounting an external usb hard
drive and dd'ing the image onto that USB drive.  After I have the dd
image, I'm converting it over to a .vdi file.  The process takes
forever. 4-5 hours for a dd image, 4-5 hours to convert, 45 minutes to
copy the .vdi file onto the host machine.

The bottlenecks appear to be the usb drive and the size of the dd
images. I'm considering just opening the case and connecting a hard
drive to the server's controller.  Anyone come up with a simpler faster
way?


:) Dave