The first tool for anyone using virtualisation

I am a fan of virtualisation, my comments on an earlier post about it being the future should be a give away. As such I have a “few” VHD's around and sometimes I have problems which the out of the box technology can’t cope with. A few of these are:

1. I sometimes there is some code, or a sample or I need to get a file to fix something which is sitting in the VHD file. The pain here is that to do that you need to boot up the VM, login in to it, find the file and copy the file to the host machine.
2. As pointed out before I work in a team which does not prescribe to what is the best tool to use. I personally use Hyper-V but that’s me. VirtualPC is used by some people who are running Vista or XP, VMWare is popular with lots of people (duh) and so is Xen, so how do I get my files to them?
3. Some times I need to test something that runs on a live system so I need a VM of the system.
4. Other times I want to deploy what I have done on a VM and deploy it to a physical machine.

Well all the above are just plain annoying, but thankfully there is a program called WinImage! (It does come with a 30day full functional evaluation edition, so don’t worry if you need to test this out before you buy it.)
So how does it solve my problems? (The numbering of each point below matches the issues I list above)

1. It allows you to open a VHD’s directly as well as a number of other formats, like ISO or VMWare’s formats! It's very simple to use as as well (similar interface to most compression tools like WinRAR or WinZIP), so you just go to File -> Open, select the VHD and it displays the contents of the almost VHD instantly (the 47Gb one from the previous example in about 2 seconds on my standard spec laptop). Now you browse it like you would any other file system, find the file, right click and hit Extract! There are even options to extract multiple files and keep the folder structure when extracting!  
2. Moving between Hyper-V and VirtualPC is fine (VHD is a compatible format between them), all I have to do is uninstall the additions before I move it. I keep VirtualPC installed for this purpose but that’s all it gets used for. WinImage allows me to convert between VHD (Virtual Server, VirtualPC and Hyper-V) and VMDK (VMWare). I can also convert from an IMA (image) file to VHD and VMDK but not too it. Unfortunately there is nothing for Xen yet, but hopefully as it gets more widely used we will see something.
3. I can rip an image of a real hard drive to a VHD or VMDK format! And because WinImage doesn’t need to be installed (it’s a single .exe which can be run from the zip archive) it makes it easy to get it onto a server! 
4. The same is true if I have an image I can write it to a physical hard drive, so no more extracting and coping and rebuilding. Once your environment works, just deploy it!