Dilip Naik, a former Microsoft employee, awarded as Most Valuable Professional (MVP) in the File Systems and Storage category, recently released a couple of interesting tools for Hyper-V: VMProv and VHDCopy.
VHDCopy is a patent-pending command line utility that significantly reduce the time required to copy large virtual hard drives files by skipping unnecessary portions of data (like the hibernation file) inside the VHD itself.
It only works with offline VMs and fixed VHD files up to 148GB that are formatted with NTFS.
Naik claims it performs 2x-10x faster than other copy operations, like the System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) check-in/check-out operation or the manual copy command performed by an admin, by reducing the disk I/O operations from 20% to 90%.
VMProv is another patent-pending command line utility that works with VHDCopy, allowing the administrator to use the virtual machine while VHDCopy is still performing the copy operation.
Every operation made during this timeframe is managed by a mini file system filter driver that will apply the changes to the copied VHD file as soon as the copy ends.
Both tools are in beta right now and available here.
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