[GTALUG] Seeking recommendation: KVM vs Virtualbox

[Alvin Starr]

As a general rule a hard disk image can be made to boot under both KVM 
and VB or VMware.

The first problem you may have migrating is the fact that the disk 
controllers may not be compatible between the physical system and the VM 
engine you pick.
Usually this can be solved by pre-installing a compatible windows 
disk-controller before you make the image to try and boot.
There are also physical-to-virtual tools from both VB and KVM(virt-p2v) 
that will supposedly create a bootable VM image from a physical Windows 
system.
I have never been in a position where they were a usable solution 
because they require physical access to the server and most times I was 
repairing systems in nowhereland.

I have not yet had problems with video drivers but it is possible that 
if you have a really unusual video card/interface that you may need to 
install new video drivers.

Not sure about just taking the NTFS partition.
You will likely need to take the boot partition and first few sectors of 
the disk with its geometry.

VirtualBox is slicker than KVM(libvirt) but KVM is friendlier if you 
want to build out a bunch of servers and like more programmatic control.
VirtualBox also had( Been a while since I tried this )  better USB 
drivers and tools for sharing data between your linux system and the 
Windows VM.

I would suggest you try the P-to-V tools first and see how well they 
work before chasing down the rabbit hole of installing drivers and doing 
image copies.

A little "duckduckgo-ing" and.
VB does not support moving physical to virtual... 
https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Migrate_Windows  but does give instructions.
here are a couple of other links.
https://www.linux.org/threads/physical-to-virtual-p2v-using-virtualbox.10928/
https://www.joe0.com/2017/09/27/how-to-convert-physical-windows-computer-to-virtualbox-virtual-machine/

virt-p2v is the KVM/libvirt tool https://libguestfs.org/virt-p2v.1.html


On 2021-11-03 21:49, Michael Galea via talk wrote:
> I have an old Win XP (32 bit) instance loaded with dozens of games, that
> I would like to take traveling. I would like to run it in a VM.
> The host will be a laptop running 64 bit debian i3 core.
>
> I would really like to just turn the XP NTFS partition into an image
> file which I can run on the VM.  This would save me hundreds of hours of
> reinstalling stuff.
> The best bet for this seems to be using virtualbox, and there are
> (pretty tricky) howtos for it. I do not think you can do this at all
> with KVM.
>
> Has anyone ever managed something like this before? Let me learn from
> your pain!
>
> PS: Another alternative is to install the higher performing KVM to 
> install a fresh XP instance and use a commercial PC program mover to 
> copy the games from the PC XP to the instance, via the network. There
> are tools such as PcMover that claim to do this. Has anyone ever done
> this before?
>
> Thanks
>

-- 
Alvin Starr                   ||   land:  (647)478-6285
Netvel Inc.                   ||   Cell:  (416)806-0133
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