Physical 2 Virtual: burying old Windows boxes
Saturday, November 29th, 2008These are sad times, times I have to use and rely on Windows. Times my smiling co-workers say “Dunno!” every time their work suddenly stops working…
Anyway it’s good to see how linux is getting his way through.
In this period, we are getting greener by burying old windows boxes into KVM managed virtual ones. VMWare converter comes in handy for such tasks: just install the starter edition and follow this how to. Have it save the virtual machine on an external hard drive.
Once done, you’ll find as many .vmdk files as the hard drives you chose to convert. As the vmdk format is a public specification, KVM (son of qemu) supports it. Throw away the .vmx file, and run KVM with the VMDKs but be patient! Windows is a little more sensible than linux about hardware changes, so give your soon-to-be-virtual a run on your pc, just to be sure everything goes. Then copy the virtual images into your linux host, and schedule them to start right after boot (I’ve edited rc.local)
A couple of notes
Why Linux as a host? Because Windows runs faster when inside linux then when on it’s own hardware, and hard drives last longer.
Why not converting the services offered by those windows boxes to natively run on linux? That’s the second step: first I need to accumulate proofs of the quality of a linux environment. My smiling coworkers are sceptical.
Your host has no graphical environment: how do you manage the virtual boxes? Linux virtual boxes just need SSH: easy and fast. For the Windows ones, KVM can redirect the graphical output to an internal VNC server. So you can have a virtual machine bound to an IP address, delivering its services, while having a remote access by connecting a VNC Viewer directly to the host.
