[RndTbl] libvirt, vmware, and Windows 2000

[Adam Thompson]

Kinda orthogonal to the original problem, but if you want to run KVM VMs on a remote headless machine, I quite strongly recommend using a canned system for doing that such as ProxmoxVE (PVE) or similar, and not relying on the traditional libvirt CLI tooling.  If you don't like PVE, there are quite a few other projects that accomplish much the same ends.
-Adam

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________________________________
From: Roundtable <roundtable-bounces at muug.ca> on behalf of Scott Toderash <scott at 100percenthelpdesk.com>
Sent: Sunday, February 5, 2023 6:44:17 AM
To: Continuation of Round Table discussion <roundtable at muug.ca>
Subject: Re: [RndTbl] libvirt, vmware, and Windows 2000

I had done steps very similar to yours.

qemu-img convert -O raw S1\ -\ Production-0.vmdk
/dev/vg_vmhost9/kvm140_img

virt-install --name kvm140 --memory 4096 --vcpus 2 --disk
/dev/vg_vmhost9/kvm140_img,bus=ide --import --network default
--os-variant win2k

Initially I had tried using bus=sata and that was not bootable. IDE made
the C: accessible but I wonder if I need more parameters to map out the
other drives.

The virt-install was helpful to help me generate a decent XML file and
then I tweaked it a bit from there.

On first boot it went through the old "Windows found new hardware"
thing, which I had completely forgot about. It couldn't find any drivers
of course, so oh well. It's possible that without having installed
virtio drivers before I got my snapshot it isn't going to work but I"m
not sure about that.

Then I thought I should be able to fire up vmware player and boot the
vmdk image. Then I discovered that running player on a remote headless
machine is a real hassle. It seems possible but I haven't actually got
it working yet.




On 2023-02-04 11:36, Chris Audet wrote:
> @Scott Haven't worked much with Win 2000, thankfully.
>
> Tried to reproduce your problem in my lab by installing Win 2000
> Professional on ESXI, adding a bunch of virtual HDDs using FAT or NTFS
> with basic or dynamic disks (trying to see if some combination caused
> it to fail), downloading the VMDK files, converting to qcow2, and
> importing into Proxmox.
>
> However wasn't able to make it past the converting VMDK to qcow2 step.
>  I must've messed up somewhere because after importing the disks into
> Proxmox I just get a Windows "boot drive inaccessible" error.
>
> Sadly I didn't take many notes while experimenting with all this, but
> if you end up finding a solution I'd be very curious to learn it.
>
> The only part that stuck out to me while doing this is that when
> initializing new disks on Win 2000 it seemed to default to dynamic
> disks, and was trying to build a software raid by default.  I'm not
> sure if this would be a factor with your disk conversion - but I can
> see how if the disks are configured as a raid but "qemu-img convert"
> is handling the disks one at a time it could have strange results.
>
> bash-5.1$ qemu-img convert -p -f vmdk -O qcow2 Chris_Win2000.vmdk
> Chris_Win2000.qcow2
>  (100.00/100%)
> bash-5.1$ qemu-img convert -p -f vmdk -O qcow2 Chris_Win2000_1.vmdk
> Chris_Win2000_1.qcow2
>  (100.00/100%)
> bash-5.1$ qemu-img convert -p -f vmdk -O qcow2 Chris_Win2000_2.vmdk
> Chris_Win2000_2.qcow2
>  (100.00/100%)
> bash-5.1$ qemu-img convert -p -f vmdk -O qcow2 Chris_Win2000_3.vmdk
> Chris_Win2000_3.qcow2
>  (100.00/100%)
> root at MGV7091:~# qm importdisk 102 Chris_Win2000.qcow2 local-lvm
> root at MGV7091:~# qm importdisk 102 Chris_Win2000_1.qcow2 local-lvm
> root at MGV7091:~# qm importdisk 102 Chris_Win2000_2.qcow2 local-lvm
> root at MGV7091:~# qm importdisk 102 Chris_Win2000_3.qcow2 local-lvm
> https://ostechnix.com/import-qcow2-into-proxmox/
> https://docs.openstack.org/image-guide/convert-images.html
>
> On Tue, Jan 31, 2023 at 12:47 PM Scott Toderash
> <scott at 100percenthelpdesk.com> wrote:
>
>> If the subject line doesn't scare you then maybe you can help me out
>>
>> with this one. Windows 2000 is its own punishment at this point, but
>>
>> it's part of the mission in this case.
>>
>> I have a working Windows 2000 server running on VMWare esxi. I
>> downloaded the image as a vmdk file and attempted to import it into
>> my
>> Linux system as a KVM image. It mostly works.
>>
>> I did this successfully with 2 other machines that were Windows
>> 2012R2
>> from the same source and same destination. Those work.
>>
>> W2k is having issues because it has C: E: and F: but only C: is
>> recognized when I boot it up in the new environment. It shows that
>> E:
>> exists but it believes that it is corrupted.
>>
>> There are probably some parameters that I don't know about that I
>> need
>> to pass in order to make this work.
>>
>> The general process was download the vmdk image, use "qemu-img
>> convert"
>> to make a raw file and then try to boot that. I tried using
>> virt-install
>> and I tried some other manual config methods but this is as far as I
>>
>> have been able to get.
>>
>> Does anyone here have experience with this sort of scenario?
>>
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