VM to the rescue

The idea of Virtualization has always been appealing, especially in the education world. However, Backups are a pain.
Today we arrived at work in true ninja style as to avoid any staff with the inevitable “is the server down” question.

The network had been fried over the weekend by a direct lightning strike. The server had also freaked out; I assume the board had been damaged.

Not a worry, we have a full spare server available, well barebone.

The problem I had was with the restoration of the backup image. It took forever, it was a massive 2TB File.

Are there any “best practises” when dealing with VM?

Best regards