how to boot Windows partition as KVM/Qemu guest

[sam chan]

hello all,

subject line says it all.

i have a standard dual-boot of windows and linux.  would like
to boot the windows partion as a KVM guest.  is it possible?
i've searched, but haven't found a definitive answer.

i'm running Fedora 14.



thanks,
sam

[Philip Rhoades]

Sam,


On 2010-09-25 10:44, sam chan wrote:
>  hello all,
>
>  subject line says it all.
>
>  i have a standard dual-boot of windows and linux.  would like
>  to boot the windows partion as a KVM guest.  is it possible?
>  i've searched, but haven't found a definitive answer.
>
>  i'm running Fedora 14.
>
>  thanks,
>  sam 

I have MicroXP running like that - although it gets very little use . .

Regards,

Phil.
-- 
Philip Rhoades

GPO Box 3411
Sydney NSW	2001
Australia
E-mail:  phil(a)pricom.com.au

[sam chan]

hello Philip,

that's good to hear.  how do you configure this?  i'm using
virt-manager.  thanks.




On Sat, 25 Sep 2010, Philip Rhoades wrote:

>  Sam,
>
>
>  On 2010-09-25 10:44, sam chan wrote:
> > 
> > hello all,
> > 
> > subject line says it all.
> > 
> > i have a standard dual-boot of windows and linux.  would like
> > to boot the windows partion as a KVM guest.  is it possible?
> > i've searched, but haven't found a definitive answer.
> > 
> > i'm running Fedora 14.
> > 
> > thanks,
> > sam
>
>
>  I have MicroXP running like that - although it gets very little use . .
>
>  Regards,
>
>  Phil.
>  -- 
>  Philip Rhoades
>
>  GPO Box 3411
>  Sydney NSW	2001
>  Australia
>  E-mail:  phil(a)pricom.com.au
>

[Philip Rhoades]

Sam,

I have not been using virt-manager but:

Create an image file:

         dd if=/dev/zero of=disk.img bs=1024 count=2000000000

or qemu has its own image creation tool:

         qemu-img create -f qcow disk.img 2GB

or:

         qemu-img create -f raw disk.img 2GB

Boot an ISO image to install to a disk image:

         qemu -cdrom MicroXP_v0.82.iso -boot d disk.img

- I think I also needed to manually reboot with:

	qemu -hda disk.img

After install, boot the img:

	qemu-kvm disk.img

I saw a note that:

	qemu-system-x86_64

should be used to prevent future problems but I don't know what that is 
about yet . .

Hope that helps!

Regards,

Phil.

On 2010-09-25 13:43, sam chan wrote:
>  hello Philip,
>
>  that's good to hear.  how do you configure this?  i'm using
>  virt-manager.  thanks.
>
>
>
>
>  On Sat, 25 Sep 2010, Philip Rhoades wrote:
>
> > Sam,
> >
> >
> > On 2010-09-25 10:44, sam chan wrote:
> >>
> >> hello all,
> >>
> >> subject line says it all.
> >>
> >> i have a standard dual-boot of windows and linux.  would like
> >> to boot the windows partion as a KVM guest.  is it possible?
> >> i've searched, but haven't found a definitive answer.
> >>
> >> i'm running Fedora 14.
> >>
> >> thanks,
> >> sam
> >
> >
> > I have MicroXP running like that - although it gets very little use . .
> >
> > Regards,
> >
> > Phil.
> > --
> > Philip Rhoades
> >
> > GPO Box 3411
> > Sydney NSW	2001
> > Australia
> > E-mail:  phil(a)pricom.com.au
> >
>  _______________________________________________
>  virt mailing list
>  virt(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
>  https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/virt 
-- 
Philip Rhoades

GPO Box 3411
Sydney NSW	2001
Australia
E-mail:  phil(a)pricom.com.au

[sam chan]

Philip,

this would be simply creating a disk image on the host system,
which is the standard method.

i'm actually trying to avoid this.  i currently have windows
on /dev/sda1(installed natively).  i'd like to have KVM run that
as the guest OS.  is that possible?  from what i can gather,
this functionality doesn't explicitly exist in KVM; i'd have to
hack your way through it.


thanks,
sam




On Sat, 25 Sep 2010, Philip Rhoades wrote:

>  Sam,
>
>  I have not been using virt-manager but:
>
>  Create an image file:
>
>         dd if=/dev/zero of=disk.img bs=1024 count=2000000000
>
>  or qemu has its own image creation tool:
>
>         qemu-img create -f qcow disk.img 2GB
>
>  or:
>
>         qemu-img create -f raw disk.img 2GB
>
>  Boot an ISO image to install to a disk image:
>
>         qemu -cdrom MicroXP_v0.82.iso -boot d disk.img
>
>  - I think I also needed to manually reboot with:
>
>  	qemu -hda disk.img
>
>  After install, boot the img:
>
>  	qemu-kvm disk.img
>
>  I saw a note that:
>
>  	qemu-system-x86_64
>
>  should be used to prevent future problems but I don't know what that is about 
>  yet . .
>
>  Hope that helps!
>
>  Regards,
>
>  Phil.
>

[Dor Laor]

On 09/26/2010 07:47 AM, sam chan wrote:
>  i'm actually trying to avoid this.  i currently have windows
>  on /dev/sda1(installed natively).  i'd like to have KVM run that
>  as the guest OS.  is that possible?  from what i can gather,
>  this functionality doesn't explicitly exist in KVM; i'd have to
>  hack your way through it. 
With some basic hacking it should be fine.
One will need to convince the window guests that instead of using a 
partition it has a full disk now (virtualized). There might even be a 
chance that it will just work.

Another obstacle is to change the windows boot driver from whatever it 
is on physical (scsi/sata) to either virtio or ide.

You can learn those things out of the v2v tool (libguestfs).

Thanks,
Dor

[Daniel Sanabria]

I know you can use vmware converter (i'm done this myself in the past) it
will allow you to convert  local and remote physical machines into virtual
machines most likely in vkdm format that you can then run from kvm.

Not sure if libguestfs or any other open source tool allows you to do this,
but I'd certainly love to see an open source alternative to this approach.

Danieo

On 26 September 2010 12:01, Dor Laor <dlaor(a)redhat.com&gt; wrote:

>  On 09/26/2010 07:47 AM, sam chan wrote:
>  > i'm actually trying to avoid this.  i currently have windows
>  > on /dev/sda1(installed natively).  i'd like to have KVM run that
>  > as the guest OS.  is that possible?  from what i can gather,
>  > this functionality doesn't explicitly exist in KVM; i'd have to
>  > hack your way through it.
>
>  With some basic hacking it should be fine.
>  One will need to convince the window guests that instead of using a
>  partition it has a full disk now (virtualized). There might even be a
>  chance that it will just work.
>
>  Another obstacle is to change the windows boot driver from whatever it
>  is on physical (scsi/sata) to either virtio or ide.
>
>  You can learn those things out of the v2v tool (libguestfs).
>
>  Thanks,
>  Dor
>  _______________________________________________
>  virt mailing list
>  virt(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
>  https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/virt
>

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Sun, Sep 26, 2010 at 12:11:45PM +0100, Daniel Sanabria wrote:
>  I know you can use vmware converter (i'm done this myself in the
> past) it
>  will allow you to convert  local and remote physical machines into virtual
>  machines most likely in vkdm format that you can then run from kvm.
>  
>  Not sure if libguestfs or any other open source tool allows you to do this,
>  but I'd certainly love to see an open source alternative to this approach. 
You would need virt-p2v, but that doesn't solve the problem since it
makes a copy of the Windows disk, and the requester wants to run the
original in place.

As Dor pointed out, this is more complex than it looks.  If you just
configure the guest to have for example:

<disk type='block'>
  <source dev='/dev/sda1'/>
  <target dev='hda' bus='ide'/>
</disk>

then virtual Windows will see a block device containing the filesystem
(no partition table).  It's unlikely that Windows will even boot.

Another way to do it is very hairy, but might just work:

<disk type='block'>
  <source dev='/dev/sda'/>
  <target dev='hda' bus='ide'/>
</disk>

Of course now virtual Windows will see the host disk, so you'd need to
be extremely careful not to modify the partition table or the Linux
host partition from the guest (not to mention security concerns).

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
virt-top is 'top' for virtual machines.  Tiny program with many
powerful monitoring features, net stats, disk stats, logging, etc.
http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-top

[Tom Horsley]

On Tue, 28 Sep 2010 11:21:21 +0100
Richard W.M. Jones wrote:

>  Of course now virtual Windows will see the host disk, so you'd
> need to
>  be extremely careful not to modify the partition table or the Linux
>  host partition from the guest (not to mention security concerns). 
I asked something like this once and someone suggested using the
device mapper stuff to put together different bits into something
that looks like a whole disk. A file with the disk header and
phony partition table, and the real windows partition. Lots of
details to try and get right there though :-).

Also, the bigger problem is that the hardware will look completely
different to windows, so you'll almost certainly be forced to
activate again, then you'd probably never be able to dual boot.

[Thomas Sjolshagen]

On Tue, 28 Sep 2010 07:16:47 -0400, Tom Horsley <horsley1953(a)gmail.com&gt;
wrote:

[SNIP]

>  
>  Also, the bigger problem is that the hardware will look completely
>  different to windows, so you'll almost certainly be forced to
>  activate again, then you'd probably never be able to dual boot. 
Historically, the workaround for that has been to switch the PCI/ACPI
libraries in Windows to the generic ones (and away from the chip-set
specific ones). Then you (re)activate that configuration and if few
enough "things" (pieces of HW) are changed the activation process should
not get (re)triggered. 

IIRC, there used to be a "no more than two changes between boots or the
activation needs to be redone" rule, but that could have changed.
Keeping in mind that a memory size change beyond a certain percentage
would count as a "thing changed", as does a new graphics adapter, etc,
etc.

// Thomas

[Kenneth Armstrong]

Is virt-p2v usable again?  The last I heard it was being (slowly) rewritten.

On Tue, Sep 28, 2010 at 8:00 AM, Thomas Sjolshagen
<thomas(a)sjolshagen.net&gt; wrote:
>  On Tue, 28 Sep 2010 07:16:47 -0400, Tom Horsley <horsley1953(a)gmail.com&gt;
>  wrote:
>
>  [SNIP]
>
> >
> > Also, the bigger problem is that the hardware will look completely
> > different to windows, so you'll almost certainly be forced to
> > activate again, then you'd probably never be able to dual boot.
>
>  Historically, the workaround for that has been to switch the PCI/ACPI
>  libraries in Windows to the generic ones (and away from the chip-set
>  specific ones). Then you (re)activate that configuration and if few
>  enough "things" (pieces of HW) are changed the activation process should
>  not get (re)triggered.
>
>  IIRC, there used to be a "no more than two changes between boots or the
>  activation needs to be redone" rule, but that could have changed.
>  Keeping in mind that a memory size change beyond a certain percentage
>  would count as a "thing changed", as does a new graphics adapter, etc,
>  etc.
>
>  // Thomas
>  _______________________________________________
>  virt mailing list
>  virt(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
>  https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/virt
>

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Tue, Sep 28, 2010 at 08:38:41AM -0400, Kenneth Armstrong wrote:
>  Is virt-p2v usable again?  The last I heard it was being (slowly)
> rewritten. 
Yes, there's some development on this front now since we got the
hardware set up to test it (yesterday).

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
New in Fedora 11: Fedora Windows cross-compiler. Compile Windows
programs, test, and build Windows installers. Over 70 libraries supprt'd
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/MinGW http://www.annexia.org/fedora_mingw

[sam chan]

so looks like this functionality is just more involved
and complex than i realized.  probably not worth the
effort, at this point, to try to hack my way through
it.

moving forward, would this be something that's worth
adding as an explicit feature to KVM?



-sam




On Tue, 28 Sep 2010, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:

>  On Sun, Sep 26, 2010 at 12:11:45PM +0100, Daniel Sanabria wrote:
> > I know you can use vmware converter (i'm done this myself in the past) it
> > will allow you to convert  local and remote physical machines into virtual
> > machines most likely in vkdm format that you can then run from kvm.
> >
> > Not sure if libguestfs or any other open source tool allows you to do this,
> > but I'd certainly love to see an open source alternative to this approach.
>
>  You would need virt-p2v, but that doesn't solve the problem since it
>  makes a copy of the Windows disk, and the requester wants to run the
>  original in place.
>
>  As Dor pointed out, this is more complex than it looks.  If you just
>  configure the guest to have for example:
>
>  <disk type='block'>
>   <source dev='/dev/sda1'/>
>   <target dev='hda' bus='ide'/>
>  </disk>
>
>  then virtual Windows will see a block device containing the filesystem
>  (no partition table).  It's unlikely that Windows will even boot.
>
>  Another way to do it is very hairy, but might just work:
>
>  <disk type='block'>
>   <source dev='/dev/sda'/>
>   <target dev='hda' bus='ide'/>
>  </disk>
>
>  Of course now virtual Windows will see the host disk, so you'd need to
>  be extremely careful not to modify the partition table or the Linux
>  host partition from the guest (not to mention security concerns).
>
>  Rich.
>
>  -- 
>  Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
>  virt-top is 'top' for virtual machines.  Tiny program with many
>  powerful monitoring features, net stats, disk stats, logging, etc.
>  http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-top
>  _______________________________________________
>  virt mailing list
>  virt(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
>  https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/virt
>

[Henning Rohde]

Sorry for not answering any earlier - one need's just a bit of magic on 
sfdisk and dmsetup:

>  # dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/zero count=63
>  # losetup -fv /tmp/zero
>  # echo -e "unit: sectors\n\n/dev/sda1 : start= 63, size= $( blockdev --getsz
> /dev/sda1 ), Id=7" | sfdisk --force /dev/loop0
>  # echo -e "0 63 linear /dev/loop0 0\n63 $( blockdev --getsz /dev/sda1 ) linear
> /dev/sda1 0" | dmsetup -v create virtdisk
>  # fdisk -lu /dev/mapper/virtdisk 
On my tests I could at least fsck the partition - YMMV!

	Henning


Am 28.09.2010 18:27, schrieb sam chan:
>  so looks like this functionality is just more involved
>  and complex than i realized.  probably not worth the
>  effort, at this point, to try to hack my way through
>  it.
>
>  moving forward, would this be something that's worth
>  adding as an explicit feature to KVM?
>
>
>
>  -sam
>
>
>
>
>  On Tue, 28 Sep 2010, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
>
> > On Sun, Sep 26, 2010 at 12:11:45PM +0100, Daniel Sanabria wrote:
> >> I know you can use vmware converter (i'm done this myself in the past) it
> >> will allow you to convert  local and remote physical machines into virtual
> >> machines most likely in vkdm format that you can then run from kvm.
> >>
> >> Not sure if libguestfs or any other open source tool allows you to do this,
> >> but I'd certainly love to see an open source alternative to this approach.
> >
> > You would need virt-p2v, but that doesn't solve the problem since it
> > makes a copy of the Windows disk, and the requester wants to run the
> > original in place.
> >
> > As Dor pointed out, this is more complex than it looks.  If you just
> > configure the guest to have for example:
> >
> > <disk type='block'>
> >   <source dev='/dev/sda1'/>
> >   <target dev='hda' bus='ide'/>
> > </disk>
> >
> > then virtual Windows will see a block device containing the filesystem
> > (no partition table).  It's unlikely that Windows will even boot.
> >
> > Another way to do it is very hairy, but might just work:
> >
> > <disk type='block'>
> >   <source dev='/dev/sda'/>
> >   <target dev='hda' bus='ide'/>
> > </disk>
> >
> > Of course now virtual Windows will see the host disk, so you'd need to
> > be extremely careful not to modify the partition table or the Linux
> > host partition from the guest (not to mention security concerns).
> >
> > Rich.
> >
> > --
> > Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
> > virt-top is 'top' for virtual machines.  Tiny program with many
> > powerful monitoring features, net stats, disk stats, logging, etc.
> > http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-top
> > _______________________________________________
> > virt mailing list
> > virt(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
> > https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/virt
> >
>  _______________________________________________
>  virt mailing list
>  virt(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
>  https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/virt
>  

-- 

Mit freundlichen Grüßen

i.A. Henning Rohde

AFC Auto Fleet Control GmbH
Wir machen mit Ihren Schäden kurzen Prozess.

Großmoorbogen 25
D-21079 Hamburg
Telefon [phone] - 118
Telefax [phone] - 815
www.autofleetcontrol.de

Amtsgericht: Hamburg HRB 69990 - Steuernummer: 47/700/00624
Geschäftsführer: Rüdiger Hoffmann, Daniel Schreiber

[Bill McGonigle]

On 09/28/2010 06:21 AM, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
>  Another way to do it is very hairy, but might just work:
>
>  <disk type='block'>
>     <source dev='/dev/sda'/>
>     <target dev='hda' bus='ide'/>
>  </disk>
>
>  Of course now virtual Windows will see the host disk, so you'd need to
>  be extremely careful not to modify the partition table or the Linux
>  host partition from the guest (not to mention security concerns). 
Way back when VMWare was still hosted at Cornell, I used to dual-boot 
Linux and Windows2000 this way.  It involved setting up two hardware 
profiles and mucking about in boot.ini for boot profiles, or something 
to that effect.

It actually worked, though.  But that was before all the hardware-change 
activation nonsense too, so I don't know if/how hardware profiles are 
still available and how that would affect activation.  Also, the big 
virus of the day was ILOVEYOU and there weren't any rootkits out 
(Russian mafia or Sony) and proprietary software didn't write to your 
MBR for licensing information (TurboTax).

The best use cases I can imagine for still doing this would also revolve 
around more proprietary software licenses (seeing a pattern here)?  You 
might consider hosting your data on a Samba or iSCSI volume and having 
two Windows installs, but again, this sounds like a licensing problem 
more than anything.

-Bill

-- 
Bill McGonigle, Owner
BFC Computing, LLC
http://bfccomputing.com/
Telephone: [phone]
Email, IM, VOIP: bill(a)bfccomputing.com
VCard: http://bfccomputing.com/vcard/bill.vcf
Social networks: bill_mcgonigle/bill.mcgonigle

[Frank Murphy]

On 25/09/10 04:43, sam chan wrote:
>  hello Philip,
>
>  that's good to hear.  how do you configure this?  i'm using
>  virt-manager.  thanks.
>
>  
You may get some ideas here:
http://www.debianhelp.org/node/8747
ymmv

But in reality, I think you will end up creating an image using 
Virt-Manger and doing an actual install of Win., to get what you need.

I would say if the Dual-boot is working fine, stick with it.

-- 
Regards,

Frank Murphy
UTF_8 Encoded
Friend of Fedora