Windows 10: Booting a Windows VM from Real physical disc or a physical EXT USB

Hi folks
Not sure if this works on HYPER-V but using KVM/QEMU you can boot a Windows VM from a real physical HDD or a Windows to Go stored on an external USB.

This means that you can say backup an image of your REAL Windows system and then attach the disk to the VM and then set it as the boot device

Most of the drivers should be fine !!! and you should be able to get as near native speed as makes no difference -- the main problem I'd imagine for users here is the graphics as a lot here won't have a spare graphics port (separate graphics outlet - not simply "dual monitor support" from one card). However you can still paravirtualize the graphics -- you'll need to install the appropriate graphics driver -- the one to use is from the REDHAT / FEDORA Win virtio iso --works on other distros such as ubuntu / debian / arch linux etc.

Those without dual NIC's can also share the single NIC for networking.

Cheers
jimbo

:)

 

Booting a Windows VM from Real physical disc or a physical EXT USB

Hi folks
Not sure if this works on HYPER-V but using KVM/QEMU you can boot a Windows VM from a real physical HDD or a Windows to Go stored on an external USB.

This means that you can say backup an image of your REAL Windows system and then attach the disk to the VM and then set it as the boot device

Most of the drivers should be fine !!! and you should be able to get as near native speed as makes no difference -- the main problem I'd imagine for users here is the graphics as a lot here won't have a spare graphics port (separate graphics outlet - not simply "dual monitor support" from one card). However you can still paravirtualize the graphics -- you'll need to install the appropriate graphics driver -- the one to use is from the REDHAT / FEDORA Win virtio iso --works on other distros such as ubuntu / debian / arch linux etc.

Those without dual NIC's can also share the single NIC for networking.

Cheers
jimbo

 

Booting a Windows VM from Real physical disc or a physical EXT USB

Hi there
great tutorial and it works !!! but of course the two problems I have with this

1) you aren´t using Native I/O for the Vitrual machines I/O
2) remote connection to a HYPER-V type VM is still via RDP which is HIDEOUS

However you can IMO get better throughput (and better mouse etc control) is to connect to a VM created with HYPER-V from a Linux machine and use something like rdesktop or krdc -- seems to be a lot snappier !!!

Another problem with HYPER-V VM's is that dynamic re-direction of USB devices doesn't work very well (if at all) and booting from actual physical devices --well it seems they will boot from an iso file but not for example if you want to plug a physical usb in -so doing a macrium restore is hard --you can't dynamically attach (re-direct) say another HDD where the image is on after you've bought up the VM.

What I'm trying to do is to make the VM almost indistinguishable performance wise from the "Native" system -- I'm about 95% there !!! --using Free OS's and VM software. I don't need to try and mess around with ESXI --trying to run away as fast as possible from VMWare as it always seems to break after every major Linux or Windows update (and please pay xxxx to get the next VMWare release ) !!. I'm getting too old to continue to keep playing that type of game.

KVM actually is a really good HYPERVISOR since once the VM is up it really doesn't use a lot of overhead from the HOST OS (provided you avoid the paravirtualisation stuff and pass thru as much hardware as possible) -- and things like Windows VM's etc can be installed on servers which don't even have an OS GUI --just CLI so you access the VM's remotely via a laptop etc.

These days with fast connections even a HOME LAN should provide a 1Gb/s connection --fast enough for any Windows system logged on to via another machine.

KVM stands for Kernel Virtual Machine -- and since Linux kernels are quite small the OS overhead of these hypervisors is fairly minimal !!!

Cheers
jimbo

 

Booting a Windows VM from Real physical disc or a physical EXT USB

Hi there
another OK solution - but using any sort of "Non native" file system / I/O will decrease the performance of the VM -- the idea is to get the VM to perform as near possible to Native speed -- having VHD/VHDX files means that essentially the I/O algorithms take longer to execute because you have to map the vhd/vhdx structure to the OS underlying file system .

Assuming enough RAM in the system the biggest bottleneck to Virtual Machines is within the Disk I/O subsystem -- actually most consumer grade computers suffer from poorish Disks as well !!

Commercial servers Virtualize cloud and other servers by using things like SAS- Fibre etc for extremely fast I/O -- for a lot of servers --themselves running as Virtual machines - graphics isn't an issue as that can be done on the remote clients.

At a consumer level Disks are still the most important part -- get those right and the rest will usually follow. __Most CPU's on home computers these days are perfectly capable of running certainly up to 3 VM's concurrently - depending on your RAM availbility they could run more.

Remotely accessing the VM (even on a LAN) with a machine with good graphics will yield an even better performance --assuming your LAN is nice and fast --Graphics in my laptop is far superior to that on the HOST SERVER and so I use krdc to access the Windows VM on my main server.

Cheers
jimbo