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Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Archive for the ‘Hyper-V’ Category

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virtualization – Convert a hard-drive into a VMWare machine – Server Fault

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/04/29

Sometimes machines die without one having had the chance of doing a proper bootable file-system backup instead of a file-by-file-backup.

You can still P2V these machines (convert them from physical to virtual), but it is a lot more pain as you have to try to grab any installation keys for them and create a compatible virtual machine configuration by hand like I did in P2V of an existing XP machine to Hyper-V to have an emergency fallback when retiring old XP physical machines.

The below linked answer (with steps) uses Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery (now back in the hands of Veritas again as Backup Exec) to make part of this process towards VMware ESXi less tedious: [Wayback] virtualization – Convert a hard-drive into a VMWare machine – Server Fault (thanks [Wayback] Mark Booth and [Wayback] Dave M)

Doing this might require you to find old Windows XP media. Those are in the Internet Archive (often slower, but has the file hashes too) and The Eye (much faster from where I live in Europe); Internet Archive examples are for English, though other languages are present as well:

Got the Internet Archive tip from [Wayback/Archive.is] Where can I download an official Windows XP ISO? I have a license key if that helps? : windows, found the correct filename there, then downloaded the [Wayback] The Eye.

–jeroen

Posted in Hyper-V, Power User, Virtualization, VMware, VMware ESXi, Windows | Leave a Comment »

Stop 0x0000007B after converting an existing XP machine to a Virtual Machine (ESXi, Hyper-V, or other)

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/22

In 2015, I posted P2V of an existing XP machine to Hyper-V to have an emergency fallback when retiring old XP physical machines and did a short edit on 20210727 promising about a future article on trying to fix the [Wayback] stop 0x0000007B blue screen.

This stop can that can happen during boot when the converted Windows XP requires different disk drivers than the physical Windows XP. Windows Vista and up are smarter to figure out the required changes, but Windows XP wasn’t.

The above screenshot is actually from the same physical Windows XP machine after doing the conversion, I wanted to try and run the virtual machine on physical hardware close to the original before moving it to the actual VMware host (yup, the Windows XP machine had been used as a VMware host before, so it had both VMware Workstation 6.5 and VMware Converter 4.01 installed).

The reason I wanted to move my last Windows XP machine to a virtual machine was that it was the only computer that could still print to my old, but nice, Olympus P-400 color dye sublimation printer. I mentioned this in 2015 when Installing the PIXMA mini260 – Canon Europe drivers under Windows 8.1 x64 – trying to say goodbye to Windows XP

I need to find a way to get my [Wayback/Archive.is] Olympus Camedia P-400 Digital Color Photo Printer. That is a lot harder: the latest Windows [Wayback] P-400 Printer > Software Downloads are for Windows XP.

At the end, of the blog post are a few links on the stop 0x0000007B and the Universal Boot CD for Windows workaround.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Fusion, Hyper-V, Power User, View, Virtualization, VMware, VMware Converter, VMware ESXi, VMware Workstation, Windows, Windows XP | Leave a Comment »

How to auto start virtual machines in Windows 10 Hyper V – YouTube

Posted by jpluimers on 2021/07/30

One day I will need this: How to auto start virtual machines in Windows 10 Hyper V – YouTube.

Via [WayBack] windows 10 automatically start a vm – Google Search.

Requires Hyper-V to be installed, so these should be useful:

–jeroen

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Hyper-V, Power User, Virtualization, Windows, Windows 10 | Leave a Comment »

Packer template for Alpine Linux on Hyper-V and Azure; GitHub – tomconte/packer-alpine-azure

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/10/05

Cool: a Packer template for Alpine Linux on Hyper-V and Azure: [WayBack] GitHub – tomconte/packer-alpine-azure

I like Alpine Linux because it is lightweight and the focus of being very secure, how popular it is in the Docker scene where it replaced Ubuntu and is now the standar package at [Archive.is/A2] library/alpine – Docker Hub and the motto [WayBack] Alpine Linux; Small. Simple. Secure. Alpine Linux is a security-oriented, lightweight Linux distribution based on musl libc and busybox.

Alpine is not yet out of of the box endorsed by Azure ([WayBack] Endorsed distributions of Linux | Microsoft Docs) so this is a very welcome tool.

From the readme:

Packer template for Alpine Linux on Hyper-V and Azure

This Packer template will generate a VHD suitable for use in Hyper-V or Azure.

How it works

  • The Packer template downloads the Alpine 3.6 ISO from the official download site.
  • It then uses setup-alpine to perform an installation to disk.
  • The answers file is served using Packer’s built-in HTTP server.
  • It also installs the hvtools package and enables the hv_kvp_daemon service so Hyper-V can detect the VM is running and retrieve its IP address. (Read more about Hyper-V Integration Services.)

Software installed

The Packer provisioning step performs the following actions in order to prepare a proper Azure image:

  • Installs Python and OpenSSL, plus sudo and bash
  • Installs the shadow package (for useradd)
  • Installs the Azure Linux Agent
  • Adds recommended boot parameters
  • Sets the ssh client interval to 180
  • Enables the Azure Agent to start at boot

The template also installs a custom useradd script (in /usr/local/sbin) that changes the behavior of adding password-less accounts (i.e. accounts that log in using SSH keys). By default useradd locks the password-less account, preventing it from logging in. The custom script forces an illegal password, so that the password cannot be used to log in, but leaves the account unlocked so it can be access via SSH.

How to use the template

On Linux, using qemu

Check out the packer-qemu branch for a WIP version that builds the Alpine image using qemu, allowing you to generate the image from a Linux machine.

Detailed docs TBD, but the Windows instructions below should help.

On Windows, using Hyper-V

The commands need to be run from an elevated PowerShell prompt so that they can interact with Hyper-V.

First run the template. This will generate a VHDX file locally, in output-hyperv-iso.

packer build alpinehv.json

To use the image in Azure, you need to convert the image to VHD using convert.ps1.

The deploy.cmd script will upload the VHD to Azure and start a VM based on the image. Please amend the script variables as necessary.

Once the VM is started, you can log on via ssh and make any additional changes. Then deprovision the VM to get it ready to be used as an image:

waagent -deprovision

Finally, makeimage.cmd will deallocate the VM, capture it as an image, and start another VM based on that image.

TODO

  • Review/tweak boot command based on ladar’s comment
  • Investigate iptables error messages

Used tooling:

If you are Dutch, or you are fine with a Google translate, then read this background info:

Endorsed version combinations grouped by heritance:

A few others covered in [WayBack] Review: The best Linux distros for Docker and containers | InfoWorld:

and [WayBack] Linux Distributions Optimized for Hosting Docker · Sweetcode.io:

  • Alpine Linux,
  • Container Linux,
  • RancherOS,
  • Atomic Host,
  • Boot2Docker,
  • Ubuntu Core

–jeroen

Posted in Azure Cloud, Cloud, Cloud Development, Development, Hyper-V, Infrastructure, Power User, Virtualization, Windows Azure | Leave a Comment »

Always use SCSI for your VM guest disks – Jeroen Wiert Pluimers – Google+

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/01/20

Rephrased from [WayBack] Jeroen Wiert Pluimers – Google+:

If you install a virtual machine, ensure the disk controller and disks are SCSI based.

This has many advantages, including:

  • speed (usually the SCSI drivers can be paravirtualised)
  • hot addition of new disks

It holds for virtually any virtualization platform including all non-ancient (less than ~10 year old) versions of:

  • VMware (Workstation, Viewer, but I expect this also to work on vSphere, ESXI, Fusion)
  • Hyper-V
  • KVM (and therefore Proxmox)
  • VirtualBox

Based on my notes in the above link and the links below:

Note this isn’t just for Linux guests/hosts: Most guests (including Windows) can do a SCSI bus re-scan and detect new SCSI devices.

The trick here is that the guest must already have a virtual SCSI controller (adding that will require a reboot of the guest).

Then adding a new SCSI disk on that controller from any host (Windows, Mac, ESXi, vSphere) should work fine.

–jeroen

Posted in ESXi4, ESXi5, ESXi5.1, ESXi5.5, ESXi6, ESXi6.5, Fusion, Hyper-V, KVM Kernel-based Virtual Machine, Power User, Proxmox, View, VirtualBox, Virtualization, VMware, VMware ESXi, VMware Workstation | Leave a Comment »

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