Windows 7 Qcow2 File Download
Crista Wilbers
If you install with iso file, you can refer to the instructions in this link. In our article, using the available qcow2 file is much simpler. You can read the article combined with watching the video at the end of the article to do it faster and more accurately.
My initial, naive, keep it simple config was to put 1TB qcow2 file with the defaults inside a ZFS dataset mounted at `/var/lib/libvirt/images` with the default 128K recordsize and compression set to lz4.
I have tried twiddling various settings, including increasing the cluster size of the qcow2 image to 1MB (to take account of the QCOW2 L2 cache), both with and without a matching ZFS recordsize, playing with extended_l2 and smaller record sizes, and also raw images. None of these have made a significant difference. I've also tried it on a ZVOL and the performance was poor there as well.
tl;dr - after many problems trying to migrate a virtualbox vdi to a virt-manager/kvm I never found complete explanation nor how to! I had to figure it out and find the solution for the blue screen I always had on my virtual windows guest. Hope this helps newbies do the migration more easily ;-)
Intro: Never saw a complete explanation on how to do this migration of virtual machines (aside the qemu-img command syntax!) so I've decided to came here and give my 2 cents to every newbie here wiling to move their windows virtual machines to virt-manager!
In this step, we'll just reduce our windows partitions directly from Windows. The resulting disk image at the end of this step will be the sum of the boot partition, the C: drive (reduced) and a leftover unused space that we will delete (by not copying it over to a new disk).
Notice that we have /dev/sda1 which is our windows boot partition of 350 MB, /dev/sda2 which is our C: partition of now 34 GB and that the total disk image /dev/sda/ is of 100 G leaving us with a bunch of space to trim.
Punch holes. There are a few ways to do this... here is a fast way, using a python script. First stop the vm, then run the script on the disk file(s). If it's a qcow2 file or another format, it should work the same, but there might be something I am forgetting, or simply an easier way.
I did not know that, thank you for the info, although I thought VirtIO was the fastest non-emulated driver, why use SCSI, is it slower (apologies for my lack of knowledge).
OK, I have just added a 2nd SCSI HDD in the Virsh VM (with VirtIO SCSI controller), booted the VM and made sure SCSI drivers are all good. Shutdown the VM, then change the Boot drive from VirtIO to SCSI, rebooted the VM, all good. I then shutdown, converted the qcow2 image, copied to LXD VM location (as per above), and now the Windows LXD VM boots fine, no issues.
Thanks for your help.
Ok, thanks for the follow up. If they possibly think they need the windows desktop for a specific app is mostly what I was curious about on the chance we provided that app for use already as an interactive app.
I just started using qemu now but the options I have with RHEL 8 are not the same as what was given by Leonado. The qemu-system-x86_64 is replaced by qemu-kvm. I can get a windows desktop running inside of an xfce interactive desktop using virt-manager but I would like to know how to use the qemu-kvm to start the windows desktop without the RHEL8 interactive desktop. Does anyone have any insight into converting what Leonardo has here with the equivalent in qemu-kvm? I can come close but the display elements are for the virt-manager viewer and not with gtk.
What is "better" for such a gaming VM? `raw` or `qcow2` as vdisc? From what I read, raw should be faster (more performance) then qcow2. In older benchmarks this is truly visible, but in newer qcow2 versions this seems to have only an impact of up to 5% or even less. And are 5% that bad in order not to have such big raw images lying around when not even half of them are really used?
So my question here: Is raw really better than qcow2 in UnRAID 6.9.0-beta30? And if so, what does "better" mean? (faster vm in general, better read/write performance and how much, ...)
Windows 10 VM updated 02.03.21 with clean install on 01.03.21. Installed in raw, 3 test in Cristal disk mark after that convert to qcow2 and again same 3 tests. Unraid 6.8.3 stable. Results:
qcow2:
Go to Windows Features and tick Windows Hypervisor Platform. After that, restart the computer and type this command in the powershell (in the directory where the image and .iso resides): qemu-system-x86_64 -accel whpx -hda .\[name].qcow2 -m 512 -net nic,model=virtio -net user -cdrom .\[name].iso -vga std -boot strict=on. It should start up and you can proceed to install the OS.
Upload your qcow2 image to the qcow2 Datastore you just made above:
Screen Shot 2016-02-25 at 12.43.23 PM.png19361150 56.5 KB
Also, add these attributes:
DEV_PREFIXvd # this is to kick in virtio drivers
DRIVERqcow2 # this is to tell opennebula which transfer driver to use, by default its ssh i think. Set everything else to default.
Over time a guest's *.qcow2 disk files can grow larger than the actual data stored within them, this happens because the Guest OS normally only marks a deleted File as zero, it doesn't gets actually deleted (performance reasons), so the underlying qcow2 file cannot differentiate between allocated and used and allocated but not used storage.
Hi everyone, I am trying to migrate some VM from Hyper-V 2012 R2 to openstack. Most VM are gen2 and EFI enabled. Most of my VM are windows server 2012 R2.Below are the steps i followed for gen2: - Install VirtIO (all of them) drivers while VM is booted on the Hyper-V host- Converted the vhdx to qcow2 using cloudbase qemu-img- installed OVMF on compute nodes-Imported the qcow2 file into glance and set hwfirmwaretype=uefi- created instance from image FAILURE: windows not booting and getting message "your pc ran into a problem and needs to restart. We're just collecting some error info and then we wil restart for you"
I managed to boot windows with the same image by setting "hwdiskbus=ide" however i can't attach any secondary volume to the instance since it will only attach as /dev/hda/ instead of "/dev/vdb" and windows guest cannot see it.
Hi Lucian, thank you for your answer. I ended up setting a KVM host outside of openstack and booted my converted VM as IDE. Once the VM is booted i added a second disk as virtio disk this time, which triggered Windows to somehow "correctly" instal the viostor and vioscsi drivers knowing that i have already installed these drivers using pnputil while the VM was on hyper-v..I then shutdown the VM changed the bootable disk to VirtIO and rebooted, and windows guest booted normaly, which allowed me to move it to Openstack. It is a bit longer process but i can move forward. I hope this will help anyone in the future.
Virtio drivers can even be installed offline using dism.exe. We have some scripts that prepare Windows images which may serve as an example: -openstack-imaging-tools/blob/master/Examples/create-windows-cloud-image.ps1
I copied .qcow2 virtual drive with Windows, installed from another machine. After configuring hardware in virt-manager, sound worked.
But, if I try the same installation here, on this OpenSUSE machine, there is no sound. What is wrong?
It's very easy, not how to make Qemu Kvm Windows Image qcow2 is very simple and easy, now you can run Windows on Linux only with the command qemu-system-x86_64FileName.qcow2 or qemu-system-x86_64name_windows.img -m 8G on an already installed Linux VPS installed qemu congratulations you already have windows VPS for more details akuh.net have included the video below
9. IMPORTANT: When windows installation asks you to choose an HDD where Windows Server will be installed, choose Load driver, Browse, choose FDD B/storage/2003R2/AMD64, (AMD64 if you are installing 64bit install), click next and you will see HDD RedHat VIRTIO SCSI HDD now.
CirrisOS images can be downloaded from CirrOS official download page. CirrOS is very small Linux foot print and test image on Openstack cloud environment. If your deployment uses QEMU or KVM, we recommend using the images in qcow2 format. The most recent 64-bit qcow2 image as of this writing is cirros-0.3.4-x86_64-disk.img.
And here comes the issue, the UEFI driver ignores the KVM -boot order and always using CD-ROM as first boot device. So it never boots from the installed qcow2 disk - so the machine hangs in a CD-ROM boot-loop forever.
Qcow2, short for QEMU copy-on-write format 2, is the successor of the first-generation qcow, which has barely satisfying performance, but still cannot be compared with raw format. After optimization to the first generation of qcow, it is close to raw format in performance. Now, qcow2 is one of the mainstream image formats.
Qemu-img is an image converter which supports multiple image formats including vhd, qcow2,raw, vhdx, qcow, vdi, qed, zvh and zvhd2. It is needed to add the directory to environment variables like JDK or Python.
There are many virtualization platforms in the world. To migrate data to another platform, IT administrators often need to do conversion job to the source VM. In this post, the methods of converting vmdk to qcow2 are introduced for IT administrators.
I am trying to move our vm from proxmox server to hyper-v but I can't find any tool that converts qcow2 disks to vhd's and also on how to convert containers to vhd? If anyone has a brilliant knowledge about this, effort will be greatly appreciated.. Thanks!
Thanks guys, with the windows platform is not a problem because I know the disk2vhd tool which I have been using for a while has been working perfectly. My only concern are the containters they are linux based and from my experience setting them up was a bit tricky especially setting up the NIC cards (I don't know much about linux, thats why)