[mdlug] Creating virtual machines

[Ron Blanchett]

You might want to try running said VM in VirtualBox, there are instructions
on there wiki for turning a dd image into a virtualbox vm.

I moved away from VMWare several months ago due to the End of Life notice
for VMWare Server and several other products that I use day to day.

-Ron

"The problem in defense is how far you can go without destroying from within
what you are trying to defend from without." -- President Dwight Eisenhower


On Mon, Feb 28, 2011 at 1:44 PM, David McMillan <skyefire at skyefire.org>wrote:

>
>     So, here's my situation:  a few weeks ago, my company-issued laptop
> (a multi-boot system with Ubuntu and XP Pro SP3) was stolen from my
> vehicle (in Canada, no less -- and they say Canada is safer, hah!).
> Fortunately for me, I had recently made a complete copy of the hard
> drive to an external USB drive using dd.  I should note that this was a
> straight of=if copy, with no compression or conversion of the original
> to a file.
>     Now, the WinXP side of this laptop had quite a bit of setup work
> done on it that would be tiresome to repeat, not to mention quite a bit
> of software that can be expected not to run well (or at all) on my new
> laptop, which (when it arrives) will be running Windows 7 (but will be a
> dual-boot Win/Linux machine as soon as I get my hands on it).
>     So, my thought is, I *ought* to be able to create a VM from the
> copy of the stolen laptop's WinXP partition.  But aside from a bit of
> messing about with VMWare, I haven't got any experience in this area.
> Ideally, I'd like to create a VM that can be stored in my multi-access
> partition, and run from inside either Win7, or from Linux, so I don't
> have to reboot to access the VM when I need it.  So a multi-platform VM
> hosting system is essential, and of course the more Open-Source the better.
>     So, before I start thrashing about blindly, here's my list of
> questions:
>
>     1.  What's the best (loaded question, I know) open-source VM
> hosting system that runs under XP, Win7, and Linux well, and doesn't
> have any trouble hosting any of those OSs?
>     2.  How does one go about creating a VM from a drive image of an
> existing "hard" WinXP computer?  My only experience with VMs previously
> has been creating fresh VMs from scratch using an OS install disk.  I
> know that XP can mulish over being transferred to new hardware, but I'm
> hoping there's a howto of sorts for getting around this.
>     3.  Are there any known problems running 32-bit VMs under a 64bit
> host OS?  My new machine will be my first foray into 64bit operations.
>     4.  The new machine will have a quad-core processor.  Any
> experiences to relate regarding optimizing VMs for running on
> multi-core?  I've heard that cores can be "dedicated" to VMs to avoid
> bogging the system down, but it's not a subject I've researched yet in
> any degree of detail.
>
>
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