First some background ...
For the last two to three weeks, I have been working with Fedora (Linux)
virtualization ... specifically qemu/kvm. I have been a long time user of
VMware and and am hoping to migrate to Fedora Virtualization ("to change my
problem set").
I have successfully installed and run CentOS 5.3, Fedora 9, and Fedora 11 in
both i386 and x86_64 flavors. I have also installed and run Win2k PRO. All of
this worked just fine. Mostly I used virt-manager and only resorted to
command-line software when there was no alternative.
While I initially had some problems with the way sVirt was doing things, I
installed the preview set of packages (libvirt 0.6.5, etc) and it is mostly
"good enough" [I did find one "bug" which has been bugzillaed].
Now my problem!
I am not sure if I am trying to do something which currently cannot be done,
if I have found one or more bugs, or if I just need some help to point me in
the right direction.
I am trying to "migrate" some VMware guests over to qemu-kvm. I have tried
Win2k guests, F9 guests, and F11 guests. Because I sense that the HW version
of the disk images may be a problem, I made sure that all of the disk images
were version 3 or 4. Using vmware-vdiskmanager, I converted any "split disks"
into a single file.
I tried using the vmdk files from wmare. I tried converting the files (using
qemu-img) to both qcow2 and raw format. I tried using partimage-ng to save
(on vmware) and then restore (on qemu-kvm) the disk images.
Nothing works!
For Win2k, the guest system starts booting and then I get a host system kernel
oops. I also tried Win2k with qemu only (no kvm) ... the system started
booting and then rebooted ... endlessly.
For Fedora guests with LVM, grub brings in the kernel but then immediately
fails because it cannot find the logical volumes. For Fedora guests with just
/boot, swap, and / partitions, they fail after grub loads the kernel because
(IIRC) "setuproot" fails ... it cannot find the root partition.
I examined all of the virtual disk images that failed with guestfish and they
all looked OK. I also attached some of these virtual disks and booted up
under the rescue mode of the distribution DVD and the disks looked OK there
too.
BUT nothing worked!
Then I ran some tests with guests created under qemu-kvm. I created a small
guest by installing F11 on a SCSI drive (after doing a dance to swap things
around). This scsi install installed and ran fine.
I then took the disk image file and attached it to another guest as an IDE
drive! This booted up and ran fine.
Finally, I used partimage-ng to save the disk image originally created as SCSI
and restored it to a different ide attached disk image ... this also booted up
and ran fine.
There is documentation out there (some, not a lot) which says that I should be
able to "migrate" guests from VMware to qemu-kvm. For example:
http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/How_To_Migrate_From_Vmware_To_KVM
[I tried the above procedure, it did not work either]
What am I doing wrong???
Any hints (let alone outright explanations) will be appreciated.
BTW, there are statements that only vmdk version 3 and 4 formats ware
supported. If that is true, why are there error messages issued when a vmdk
file is processed which is not version 3 or 4?
Gene
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