Katz Jonathan E
USC Center for Applied Molecular Medicine,, 2250 Alcazar Street, CSC-244, Los Angeles, CA, 90033, USA.
Methods Mol Biol. 2017;1550:309-324. doi: 10.1007/978-1-4939-6747-6_21.
Laboratories tend to be amenable environments for long-term reliable operation of scientific measurement equipment. Indeed, it is not uncommon to find equipment 5, 10, or even 20+ years old still being routinely used in labs. Unfortunately, the Achilles heel for many of these devices is the control/data acquisition computer. Often these computers run older operating systems (e.g., Windows XP) and, while they might only use standard network, USB or serial ports, they require proprietary software to be installed. Even if the original installation disks can be found, it is a burdensome process to reinstall and is fraught with "gotchas" that can derail the process-lost license keys, incompatible hardware, forgotten configuration settings, etc. If you have running legacy instrumentation, the computer is the ticking time bomb waiting to put a halt to your operation.In this chapter, I describe how to virtualize your currently running control computer. This virtualized computer "image" is easy to maintain, easy to back up and easy to redeploy. I have used this multiple times in my own lab to greatly improve the robustness of my legacy devices.After completing the steps in this chapter, you will have your original control computer as well as a virtual instance of that computer with all the software installed ready to control your hardware should your original computer ever be decommissioned.
实验室往往是科学测量设备长期可靠运行的适宜环境。实际上，在实验室里发现5年、10年甚至20多年前的设备仍在常规使用并不罕见。不幸的是，许多这类设备的致命弱点是控制/数据采集计算机。这些计算机通常运行较旧的操作系统（如Windows XP），而且虽然它们可能只使用标准网络、USB或串行端口，但需要安装专有软件。即使能找到原始安装盘，重新安装也是个繁琐的过程，还充满了可能使过程中断的“陷阱”——丢失许可证密钥、硬件不兼容、忘记配置设置等等。如果你有仍在运行的旧仪器设备，那么计算机就是一颗定时炸弹，随时可能让你的操作停止。
在本章中，我将描述如何对你当前正在运行的控制计算机进行虚拟化。这个虚拟计算机“镜像”易于维护、易于备份且易于重新部署。我在自己的实验室中多次使用过这种方法，极大地提高了我的旧设备的稳定性。
完成本章中的步骤后，你将拥有原始控制计算机以及该计算机的虚拟实例，其中安装了所有软件，以便在原始计算机退役时能够控制你的硬件。
