Possible to move a guest OS on VirtManager (Linux) to Windows?

Question

For VirtualBox or VMware Workstation,one could copy the guest OS data directory to another computer and run it there. For example, I could create a guest OS on Linux, and then copy the guest data directory to a Windows computer and run it there. Is something like that possible with VirtManager?

I installed VirtManager on Linux. I followed a tutorial and selected QEMU/KVM. I created a guest OS. The GUI did not give me access to the location of the guest data. After searching the web, I found a big "qcow2" file in /var/lib/libvirt/images/. But I am not sure if or how I could copy the guest data to a Windows machine and run it there. Is a QEMU/KVM virtual machines only available on Linux (or Unix)?

Answer 1

You could use the qemu-img command to convert the qcow2 image file to a format that is supported by a virtual product that is better supported on Windows. For example : Virtualbox, VMware, Hyper-V.

Run the following command to convert a qcow2 image file to a vmdk image file:

qemu-img convert -f qcow2 -O vmdk oldimage.qcow2 newimage.vmdk

Answer 2

Guest disks are stored in qcow2 images – those are QEMU's equivalent to VHD/VMDK files.

QEMU is available on Windows, although not using KVM backend – instead either Intel HAXM (the one that's used by Android Emulator) or Windows Hypervisor (the one that's used by Hyper-V) will be used as the virtualization driver.

• To make QEMU run VMs through the Windows Hypervisor Platform, use -accel whpx (after enabling the Windows feature on the host OS).

• For Intel HAXM, use the -accel hax option (after disabling WHP on the host – and after installing the HAXM driver).

Regardless of backend, however, QEMU will emulate the same guest hardware, so VMs should be mostly portable between different host systems. (The WHP backend does not use Hyper-V's guest hardware emulation – WHP works on the same level as KVM and only handles CPU partitioning.)