KVM WinXP guest on physical drive

Question

I want to migrate my Windows VM from VMware player to KVM. All documents I found deal with disk images, however my current VM is installed on real NTFS filesystem, located on separate SATA drive.

Is it possible to configure KVM virtual machine with Windows XP guest, located on physical drive?

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 13 '13 at 15:23

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Use a P2V solution like virt-p2v, found here: http://libguestfs.org/virt-v2v/

There are many others and that's just an example. While technically it's "virtual", the P2V process will create a disk image that's usable with KVM.

answered Jun 13 '13 at 15:23

Nathan C

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I'd prefer to keep my VM on physical disk rather then virtual, although I would use your solution as a last resort. – qrdl Jun 13 '13 at 15:39

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 13 '13 at 16:47

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Shouldn't be a problem - just point the hypervisor to the disk instead of an image. You might want to start with setting the disks up as IDE and using mergeide.reg (can be found online) and switching to virtio later on.

Images are normally used because they are so much easier to manage, especially when there are lots of VMs to deal with.

answered Jun 13 '13 at 16:47

dyasny

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Could you please elaborate, how to point the hypervisor to the disk? – qrdl Jun 14 '13 at 14:32
in your VM definitions, you simply point to /dev/sdX and use the raw format – dyasny Jun 14 '13 at 14:38
Sounds like what I need. Did you do it? I couldn't find anything about it in the docs. – qrdl Jul 06 '13 at 20:21
yeah, I've used this method before – dyasny Jul 07 '13 at 01:37

KVM WinXP guest on physical drive

2 Answers2