[fedora-virt] how to boot Windows partition as KVM/Qemu guest

[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
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