April 19, 2010 at 16:53Porting a “physical” or MS Virtual PC to XenServer
This story is academic and perhaps not practical, however, “Howto ...”
The initial data for converting to XVA ( XenServer Virtual Appliance ) format will be VHD ( Virtual Hard Disk ) and VMC ( Virtual Machine Config ). Let's make a virtual machine from a physical machine:
Consider the option when we have an abstract PC with Microsoft OS installed. To obtain an image in VHD format, we will use the Disk2Vhd utility ( http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/ee656415.aspx) The result of this utility will be a disk image that we can use as a disk for MS Virtual PC (Server). To convert to XVA format, we need a virtual machine configuration file - there are two options:
1) create your own - using MS Virtual Server 2005 R2 (available for free from the MS website)
2) manually edit, for example, by changing the amount of RAM , my -in processors and paths to VHD ("svn3.vhd").
Please note that the generated VHD file (in my case 11GB in size) will carry the physical hard drive on which the system was deployed, say 250GB. Since I was not pleased with the prospect of giving such dimensions on the server to a virtual machine, the following steps were taken:
1) before converting the HDD to VHD artificially using (Acronis Disk Director Suite, Partition Magic, etc., etc. program) partition manager (volumes), the size of the volume on which the system was deployed from 250GB to 40GB (40GB - I just planned to give the virtual machine).
2) using the VHD Resizer utility ( http://vmtoolkit.com/files/folders/converters/entry87.aspx ), the VHD Dynamic 250GB format was converted to VHD Fixed 40GB (I draw attention to the fact that on the computer where you will do all these operations, there was a sufficient supply of space).
Now that we have VHD (the desired format) and VMC, we will start converting to XVA format using the utility v2xva.exe ( http://forums.citrix.com/servlet/JiveServlet/download/511-241595-1363444-26313/v2xva-1.3. 4.zip):
v2xva / verbose: Loud / config: ”c: \ path to the virtual machine configuration file \ myvirtpc.vmc” / output: ”path to the folder where the virus will be formed”
Last step “Import VM” from Citrix XenCenter - select the file type “ XenServer Virtual Appliance Version 1 (ova.xml) »
PS. The resulting virtual machine has a huge drawback in that the size of Storage (vdi_hda) can only be changed upwards :(
The initial data for converting to XVA ( XenServer Virtual Appliance ) format will be VHD ( Virtual Hard Disk ) and VMC ( Virtual Machine Config ). Let's make a virtual machine from a physical machine:
Consider the option when we have an abstract PC with Microsoft OS installed. To obtain an image in VHD format, we will use the Disk2Vhd utility ( http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/ee656415.aspx) The result of this utility will be a disk image that we can use as a disk for MS Virtual PC (Server). To convert to XVA format, we need a virtual machine configuration file - there are two options:
1) create your own - using MS Virtual Server 2005 R2 (available for free from the MS website)
2) manually edit, for example, by changing the amount of RAM , my -in processors and paths to VHD ("svn3.vhd").
Please note that the generated VHD file (in my case 11GB in size) will carry the physical hard drive on which the system was deployed, say 250GB. Since I was not pleased with the prospect of giving such dimensions on the server to a virtual machine, the following steps were taken:
1) before converting the HDD to VHD artificially using (Acronis Disk Director Suite, Partition Magic, etc., etc. program) partition manager (volumes), the size of the volume on which the system was deployed from 250GB to 40GB (40GB - I just planned to give the virtual machine).
2) using the VHD Resizer utility ( http://vmtoolkit.com/files/folders/converters/entry87.aspx ), the VHD Dynamic 250GB format was converted to VHD Fixed 40GB (I draw attention to the fact that on the computer where you will do all these operations, there was a sufficient supply of space).
Now that we have VHD (the desired format) and VMC, we will start converting to XVA format using the utility v2xva.exe ( http://forums.citrix.com/servlet/JiveServlet/download/511-241595-1363444-26313/v2xva-1.3. 4.zip):
v2xva / verbose: Loud / config: ”c: \ path to the virtual machine configuration file \ myvirtpc.vmc” / output: ”path to the folder where the virus will be formed”
Last step “Import VM” from Citrix XenCenter - select the file type “ XenServer Virtual Appliance Version 1 (ova.xml) »
PS. The resulting virtual machine has a huge drawback in that the size of Storage (vdi_hda) can only be changed upwards :(