[TriLUG] Questions about using Linux virtualization

Alan Porter porter at trilug.org
Fri Jul 13 15:46:00 EDT 2012


DD-ing your physical partitions to VM disk images is a good way to go.  
Sometimes, I will boot the VM with a live CD and do the copy from within 
that virtual environment.

I have had good luck with Windows 98, medium luck with Windows XP, no 
luck with Windows 7.  Windows tends to be very picky about having its 
entire hardware moved out from under it (as in, changing from using a 
physical Dell box with brand X hard drive and brand Y ethernet to a 
virtual machine with completely different virtualized devices).

Linux should "just work"... it is very tolerant of brain transplants... 
or would this be a body transplant??

Alan



On 07/13/2012 02:42 PM, Paul Boyle wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I've gotten interested in exploring how linux virtualization (using
> KVM) might be useful for me. I've done a little reading and seems that
> the examples I've come across so far involve setting up the VM then
> doing an install on the virgin VM from a dvd or cd-rom.  My questions
> revolve around how can one move an existing system (on its own
> hardware to a VM on the same or different machine.  Here are two
> things I'd like to be able to do:
>
> 1) I recently bought a new laptop, I was under pressure to get
> something finished so I took the Windows installed hard drive out and
> put the (Linux) hard drive from my old laptop in the new computer and
> finished the project.  Now I would like to use that new hard drive
> which has Windows preinstalled, and dedicating 750GB to a Microsoft OS
> seems like a tragic and terrible waste.  I would like to migrate the
> installed Windows system to a VM then reformat the hard drive so I can
> use it for what I want.  How can one do this?  Could the venerable dd
> utility be of some use here?
>
> 2) I have a legacy Linux box which I don't want to change, but I can
> tell the underlying hardware is getting a little flaky.  I would like
> to migrate this legacy system to a VM which resides on  a different
> and new computer which has a more recent (probably opensuse 12.1)
> Linux distribution installed on it.  How to do this?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Paul
>


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