@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:

@pete-s said in KVM or VMWare:

It isn't the ability to automate that is the problem. It's the availablility of easy to use tools that is the problem.

Thats the whole point I'm making.

KVM is hard to automate. Not that it's impossible, but the tooling doesn't exist to where you can easily automate like with VMware.

Agreed, and I don't think that that's the point of concern here. The issue at hand should be "does that automation that VMware offers get used by or should be used by the OP?" I believe that the answer is no to being used today and likely no to should it be used. It's a very small deployment. The overhead to the automation, even when you have VMware, is too high. And regardless, even if we agree that it should be used, probably because an MSP/ITSP is brought in to effectively make the environment larger and changing some of the scale discussions, the bigger question would be "will the OP's environment opt to do that anyway?" If that answer is "no", in the practical sense, then the automation point becomes moot.

I "think" we can all agree that VMware has better standard built in automation. And that KVM is completely automatable if you put in the extra, non-standard effort. So if we were considering standard automation then VMware would have an important edge in that area. That point shouldn't be in dispute. We can argue how close KVM gets, while still being behind, sure.

But the key point here, for me, is that I believe based on knowing the environment a bit that that automation is not, and won't be, used if VMware remains.

@stuartjordan said in Convert Between Popular VM Formats for Free with StarWind:

Looks good though if it does all. I assume it's a windows based product though?

IIRC, yes you have to install it on a Windows system and then connect to the hypervisor in question to create / export the VM you're wanting to convert.

It's been a while since I've last had to convert anything.

minfree Defines the amount of free space left in the LVM volume group pve. With more than 128GB storage available the default is 16GB, else hdsize/8 will be used.

This is space to leave behind for snapshots. They suggest 1/8th the size of your hard drive.

@scottalanmiller I have tried to connect via virtualbox before but after the windows and linux setups the screen would just turn black so i resorted to qemu and followed your discussion but now it wont connect on ubuntu

@stacksofplates said in Virtual appliances?:

@travisdh1 said in Virtual appliances?:

@stacksofplates What the what?

Install Fedora sudo dnf install -y kubernetes `systemctl enable --now podman1

That's all it takes.

Yeah I see you haven't actually done that.

Podman is not Kubernetes. Also when you install Kubernetes you don't get a podman1 service (or any type of podman service). When you install Kubernetes that way you don't get a Kubernetes service. You seemingly have to start the kube-proxy, kube-scheduler, kube-controller-manager, kube-api-server, and the kubelet separately. It installs docker, which is deprecated in k8s now. They have switched to using containerd which is pretty much the standard runtime now.

So I'll stick with my original recommendation.

Yep, this is why I need to mess with this stuff in my home lab. I can't even talk about it intelligently yet!

@EddieJennings said in Script for Creating VMs from Template VM in KVM:

@travisdh1 said in Script for Creating VMs from Template VM in KVM:

@EddieJennings said in Script for Creating VMs from Template VM in KVM:

@Pete-S said in Script for Creating VMs from Template VM in KVM:

Not the exactly the same thing but you might want to look into how to create a VM from scratch.
Meaning a script that will set up a VM with vCPU, memory, storage, network etc and then boot it from iso and have it do an unattended install, create what users you want and install the packages you need.

That's one of the next things I'm looking into.

@EddieJennings Also remember about things like kickstart in RedHat based operating systems. In Fedora/CentOS/RHOS you can use a kickstart file to automatically select all the install time options for the OS. A short time later you've got a fresh server and all the time it took you to setup was running the creation script on your hypervisor.

One of the things I'll need to figure out going the Kickstart route is setting the hostname what I want it to be at the time of installation. Likely not difficult to do, I just have to figure it out. Or perhaps, I can just truly take the approach of just making a clean minimal install, and then later configure to whatever specific thing I'm wanting the VM to do for my lab / testing.

Inside the kickstart file you'll find something like this:

network --hostname=centos8-4.example.com

We use debian as our goto and then it's called a preseed file. The only real thing that can be tricky is to tell the installation what kickstart/preseed file you want to use. You can do it in different ways. If you don't want to rely on dhcp/tftp/pxe etc you can roll your own iso file. I think the kickstart file can also be mounted as a drive that the installation will detect when it starts.

I think the best approach is to make an automated installation with same basic settings and some of those will get changed later in the installation. For example you can use a fixed hostname that is later changed from ansible.

Reporting back: The only tool that I had success with was https://relax-and-recover.org/
F33 desktop is now p2v'd.

Since you are connected to the printer via USB. Disable plug and play. And then delete all those extra printers.

TY @black3dynamite

For anyone curious, I was trying to migrate a Windows VM from QNAP to Proxmox, and this came in handy. Notes...

The VM type can be set to Q35/UEFI. There may be multiple disk images on the QNAP box for the same VM: you need all of them in the same directory for the QCOW tooling to work correctly. Turn off the VM in Virtualization Manager, and copy them over to Proxmox via SSH; you can also download them via File Manager first. importdisk on the latest file; it'll rebuild a RAW file where Proxmox keeps the data. Mount the file in Proxmox as an IDE drive, and don't forget to set the boot order ahead of CD-ROM & Network. https://github.com/virtio-win/virtio-win-pkg-scripts has the latest guest drivers for QEMU/KVM. https://superuser.com/questions/1057959/windows-10-in-kvm-change-boot-disk-to-virtio has some strategies for migrating from IDE to VirtIO; again, don't forget to check the boot order when detaching/re-attaching the disk image. Adding a tiny VirtIO drive while the system was up, shutting down, detaching the two drives & attaching the main as VirtIO; was the working solution for me. Side note: unless you remember to look up your virtual MAC address in the QNAP VM, you'll need to reconfigure your network adapter after migration.

To do that....

Edit...

sudo vi /etc/libvirt/qemu.conf

And set...

user = "root" group = "root"

And then...

sudo systemctl restart libvirtd

@EddieJennings said in MacVTap Modes:

One option I didn't see in the redhat doc was openvswitch. Don't they support it?

The link I posted was for RHEL 6. I just now saw that RHEL 8's documentation is online. I glanced through it and didn't see that mentioned. I'll read it more closely tomorrow.

https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/8/html/configuring_and_managing_virtualization/configuring-virtual-machine-network-connections_configuring-and-managing-virtualization

There's no mention of openvswitch anywhere in that document. I am aware of XenServer and XCP-ng uses it by default. So its possible RHEL just prefers using macvlan/macvtap instead of openvswitch.

@JaredBusch https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/ZFS_on_Linux

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@black3dynamite said in Mouse Issues on Windows 2019 on KVM Through Virt-Manager:

EvTouch USB Graphics Tablet is the default when selecting Server 2019 config template.

That's the one.

And the template didn't load properly when we selected it! It kept going back to Alpine!

I asked if they really had customers who would pay that amount. They said hundreds... Ummm ok, not thousands? Really?

@black3dynamite said in Spin VMs quickly with KVM + virt-sysprep:

@stacksofplates said in Spin VMs quickly with KVM + virt-sysprep:

I usually use virt-builder to build the image, and then I can clone from that. Then you have nice really small images to build from.

Have you ever created your own repo using virt-builder-repository?

No I've always pulled from upstream. I've honestly never looked into that before.

@FATeknollogee said in Hypervisors: revisit your choices!:

One downside to KVM (in virt-manager) is lack of snapshots for UEFI VMs.

yes it is.

@black3dynamite said in Converting VMware VMs to KVM:

I haven't been keeping up with Windows Admin Center for awhile. Was that an option to manage Hyper-V?

It will be, but I'm not sure that it is yet. We've tried and not been able to get it working even internally anywhere, let alone externally. Once they figure out stability and authentication, I assume that it will be great for that. Being that this is 2016, it's going to suck hard. And if there is a Hyper-V issue, WAC would be down which is a problem in a small environment like this.