| | Stumble It! | Add to Mixx! | | diigo it | | Slashdot |

Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Virtualizing Windows XP to KVM on Ubuntu 10.04

I've been struggling lately with how to convert an existing physical Windows XP based laptop to a virtualized machine that can be run on KVM. I've followed a few How-To's and by combining elements of each, I've finally been able to boot the virtualized image, though now I have to re-authenticate (more on that as I figure it out).

Setup:
  • Virtual Server (VS) - The host server running KVM
  • Test-Laptop - The WinXP laptop that I'm trying to virtualize
Procedure:
  1. Follow the steps on Microsoft's KB to enable IDE on the WinXP machine.
  2. Download, install, and run VMWare Converter on the WinXP machine.
  3. I used the defaults with "VMWare Workstation 6.5.x" as the type & stored the resulting image on a file share on the Virtual Server host.
  4. While (or before) the image is being created, download & install VMWare Server on the Virtual Server host.
  5. Once the image of the WinXP machine is created, use vmware-vdiskmanager to create a single file:
    vmware-vdiskmanager -r test-laptop.vmdk -t 0 test-laptop-single.vmdk
  6. Download the fixntldr.iso to the Virtual Server host and use it as the boot CD for the image you just created:
    kvm -hda test-laptop-single.vmdk -cdrom fixntldr.iso -boot d

0 comments: