[arch-general] Restoring a Win guest when migrating from one VM to another - Was: pacman's "Depends On"

[Guus Snijders]

2015-04-23 20:31 GMT+02:00 Ralf Mardorf <ralf.mardorf at rocketmail.com>:
> On Thu, 23 Apr 2015 18:18:49 +0100, Mauro Santos wrote:
>>You should give qemu+kvm+spice a try, I have found that it seems to
>>work acceptably even for usb redirection. Bonus points: no more
>>trouble after updates and it should work over the network.
>
> Thank you,
>
> I agree. The reason that I didn't drop Virtualbox and tested other
> hosts is, that I don't know how to get my Windows XP SP3 guest from
>
> $ ls -hlG Virt*/winOS/*.vdi
> -rw------- 1 rocketmouse 28G Apr 20 23:31 VirtualBox VMs/winOS/winOS.vdi
>
> to another host. It seems to be hard or perhaps impossible to restore a
> Win XP from a backup. I at least can't remember that it ever worked for
> me.
>
> If possible I want to restore Win XP from a backup, when migrating to
> another VM. Any hints how to backup Win XP and restore it on another
> virtual machine are welcome.

Sticking with qemu for the moment (but the same program can be used for
many formats); you can use qemu-img convert to copy your XP vdi to e.g.
qcow2 or RAW and use that for $other vm.

The openstack project has nice documentation on this:
http://docs.openstack.org/image-guide/content/ch_converting.html

Note though, that plain qemu can be a bit cumbersome, nice frontends are
available (I've used libvirt with some success in the past).


mvg,
    Guus