bhyve: migrate Windows 7 from physical to virtual?

aragats

aragats

Does anybody have experience with this?
If I have a physical disk with Windows 7 installed, can I just use its device node for bhyve(8)?
I understand that I'll need to install virtio-net drivers in Windows. What else? The generic VGA adapter doesn't need a driver. Windows may not like the hardware change and may ask to (re)activate.

Thanks for advises and ideas!
 
It should be possible to point bhyve at a physical disk for the ahci-hd device. However, Windows generally refuses to boot if moved to different hardware.

The normal way around this is to run sysprep on the Windows machine before migrating and choosing the Generalize option. This command is designed for making a re-usable image out of a Windows install and the generalize option allows it to move to different hardware. I've not tried it but I believe people have used this for moving existing systems to new hardware.

If you don't want to risk doing any damage to the existing Windows install, it may be worth taking an image of the disk (something like dd, although there may be faster options), and using that. Of course if it's a big disk that could be time consuming. (If you take an image onto a ZFS system you can take a snapshot once you have the image, then if you break something just rollback in seconds :) ).
 
Hi aragats,

I did do this; actually, I migrated Windows 7 and Windows 10. They were coming from a another VM though but I don't really see the difference.

One thing to make sure is that you specify the sector size of you disk for Windows 7 or it will have serious issues. The proper sector size for Windows 7 is 512.

I don't know if you boot your system UEFI.... It is much easier that way.... I converted my to UEFI while creating the zvol.
If you don't want to do this, I would first try to install the network drivers and set remote desktop; dump the HDD to the host's filesystem and try it out (I haven't tried this).
 
Be careful, logical and physical are two different things. Check if Windows sees sectors in size of 512 (which I am sure it does) by running
fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo c: or whatever drive you which to check is in an elevated command prompt.

Basically, Windows 7 will always use 512K sector size.
 
usdmatt said:
It should be possible to point bhyve at a physical disk for the ahci-hd device. However, Windows generally refuses to boot if moved to different hardware.
Click to expand...
Well, if the HDD and CPU are the same it wouldn't be (very) different hardware, right?
 
In my experience moving a Windows disk from one computer to another has pretty much always caused it to fail to boot.
Many backup utilities, such as Symantec System Recovery that we use regularly, actually have an 'Allow recovery to dissimilar hardware' option specifically designed to allow the system to be restored to different hardware, or to a VM. (I'm pretty sure it just does something similar to sysprep, as you get a similar process on first boot).

This is in a physical environment of course. It may be different moving between hypervisors, especially if they are both using AHCI emulation for the disk controller. I wouldn't be surprised to see a boot error if you take a physical Windows CD and try and boot it in a hypervisor though. That said, I haven't tried it, maybe you'll be in luck if the physical machine was set to AHCI mode.
 
It looks that the main problem here is UEFI.
bhyve(8) supports only UEFI, but Windows 7 was installed to use legacy boot (although the computer is UEFI).
Booting Windows installer CD (in bhyve) and trying to run "repair" leads to this error:
"This version ... is not compatible with the version of Windows you are trying to repair ..."
 
One Windows trick I have used involves deleting every Device Manager hardware entry in Safe Mode when migrating an install.
Especially the disk controllers and video.
 
tcn said:
You can convert a non UEFI to a UEFI
Click to expand...
There is a little progress: I converted it using gptgen (following these instructions). Then I ran Windows installer and used dispart to perform boot repair.
Now Windows boots in bhyve(8), but crashes even in Safe mode. Will investigate further.
Phishfry said:
deleting every Device Manager hardware entry in Safe Mode ... Especially the disk controllers and video
Click to expand...
This may help, will try tomorrow, since have no access to the physical Windows now.
 
usdmatt said:
The normal way around this is to run sysprep on the Windows machine before migrating and choosing the Generalize option.
Click to expand...
This worked (after converting to UEFI). Thanks!
However, the drawback is the machine needs to re-join the domain after sysprep, which is not always easily solvable if you're not a sysadmin.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top