Windows Server 2016 Qcow2 Image Download HOT!
Goliat Pfeiffer
If your deployment uses QEMU or KVM, we recommend using the imagesin qcow2 format, with name ending in .img.The most recent version of the 64-bit amd64-arch QCOW2 image forUbuntu 18.04 isbionic-server-cloudimg-amd64-disk.img.
Now that your Windows VM is installed, configured, and stored in yourwindowsserver2019.qcow2 image, it can be uploaded to your cloud for reuse andgeneral provisioning by all of your OpenStack users and administrators.
When transitioning to the cloud, one of the first things that a software engineer runs into is the need for a cloud-friendly image. This blog will address how you can create cloud-friendly images for windows. While there are a lot of cloud-friendly images for Linux Distros, there are precious few for windows.
There are different ways to create the image. I will outline the steps for one of the more popular ways to create images for the cloud. We will be using tools found in the cloud and in Windows 10 pro, but this can also be done with any version of windows that provides Hyper-V.
Now you should have a windows image that you can upload to OpenStack and create instances from. There are many customizations that can be done. You can also use a windows sysprep unattended.xml file to further customize the image.
It's not common to have a severe bug in Ubuntu LTS, and it's even less common to have a severe data corruption bug! We are used to the idea that data is stored reliably and safely on our computers. However, for the past week, I have been pulling my hair out because of a data corruption issue, and was really surprised to discover the true cause. I have been attempting to create several Virtual Machines (VMs) to compartmentalize my essential network services, e.g. email is separated from contacts, and I decided to use virtualized QEMU instances on my Ubuntu (18.04 LTS) system. I first provisioned a Windows Server VM, which installed flawlessly on a qcow2 image on an ext4 disk. However, I ran into issues when provisioning a Linux VM with a different virtual hard drive configuration. The drive format and definition (libvirt) for the VM was:
If you didn't change the storage location, they are in /var/lib/libvirt/images as you showed in your post above.
But when you create a VM and use another location for the disk, then of course it resides there - only you can
know where disks reside - right ? :) From within Windows means that once the VM is running, open the built-in
Disk Management application and extend the file system like it has to be done in Windows (as usual). Doing it
is self-explaining, for IT sysadmins at least. If you're unsure ask a Windows expert, but I'm sure you will get this
done yourself. As a little hint : You say the disks are in /virt1, which means most probably the right disk is there.
In this case the command would be sudo qemu-img resize /virt1/.qcow2 +195G.
Turns out, and it appears not many people are aware of it, there's a simple command line interfaceto the Transfer VMs built into Xenserver 6.x. Using the Transfer VM on thehost (dom0), you can expose any offline VDI as a raw image over HTTP usingbuilt-in commands with no additional software to install. Then, on your clientdisk system, you simply use curl to download the disk image over thenetwork. Very simple, and no third-party tools involved. The steps involved are given below:
You may also want to zero some of the free space on your Windows disk image, totake full advantage of the compressibility of theqcow2 image format. First, in your Windows VM, download the sdelete utility from here. Then, run the following command from a command prompt in Windows:
Windows is basically the same process but I highly recommend you download the Proxmox virtio window drivers ISO and install the guest agent tools before you shut down the VM and copy over the .qcow2 image file to the new proxmox server. That way, when you the Windows image boots up in Proxmox, it will have all the drivers it needs.
Also, follow the Proxmox best guide to deploy Windows 10/11 on Proxmox. Good advice in there. And seriously match your hardware exactly to how you had it in KVM/Virt Manager the best you can. I used SATA controller, SPICE video controller with at least 128 memory, enable QEMU agent, match CPU count and memory. Windows 10 Pro fired up for me right away with no issues.
VM snapshots are snapshots of the complete virtual machine including CPUstate, RAM, device state and the content of all the writable disks. Inorder to use VM snapshots, you must have at least one non removable andwritable block device using the qcow2 disk image format. Normallythis device is the first virtual hard drive.
A VM snapshot is made of a VM state info (its size is shown ininfo snapshots) and a snapshot of every writable disk image. The VMstate info is stored in the first qcow2 non removable and writableblock device. The disk image snapshots are stored in every disk image.The size of a snapshot in a disk image is difficult to evaluate and isnot shown by info snapshots because the associated disk sectors areshared among all the snapshots to save disk space (otherwise eachsnapshot would need a full copy of all the disk images).
QEMU supports many image file formats that can be used with VMs as well as withany of the tools (like qemu-img). This includes the preferred formatsraw and qcow2 as well as formats that are supported for compatibility witholder QEMU versions or other hypervisors.
Determines the qcow2 version to use. compat=0.10 uses thetraditional image format that can be read by any QEMU since 0.10.compat=1.1 enables image format extensions that only QEMU 1.1 andnewer understand (this is the default). Amongst others, this includeszero clusters, which allow efficient copy-on-read for sparse images.
If this is set to aes, the image is encrypted with 128-bit AES-CBC.The encryption key is given by the encrypt.key-secret parameter.This encryption format is considered to be flawed by modern cryptographystandards, suffering from a number of design problems enumerated previouslyagainst the qcow2 image format.
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