[BozemanLUG] Follow-up on KVM experiment

[Scott Dowdle]

Greetings,

At the meeting last night we were walking through using KVM on Fedora 22... trying to exercise the knowledge we learned about virt-v2v.  For the example we tried to use a VirtuaBox .ova file that was a Windows 7 IE VM Microsoft offers for trials... that we found here:

http://dev.modern.ie/tools/vms/

Notice on that page that there are three tabs... Windows, Mac, and Linux.  If you don't use that direct link and get there from a link on the top level modern.ie website, their system will probably take the OS string your browser gave them... and automatically select the tab for the OS (it thinks) you are running.  For most of us, it will be the Linux tab.  Of course you can click on whatever tab you want and see what they offer.  The tabs exist to offer images for the hypervisor you might be using.  So if you on Linux running VirtualBox, it makes sense to use the Linux tab and pick the only image type they have available, which is VirtualBox... oddly in .ova format.

During the meeting we used that VirtualBox .ova image with virt-v2v and had trouble converting it.  I spent a little more time last night reading the virt-v2v documentation.  Turns out that while it does do .ova files, it they say:

(http://www.libguestfs.org/virt-v2v.1.html#input-from-vmware-ova)
"Only OVAs exported from VMware vSphere will work."

That's a little weird because you'd think a format is a format... and that an .ova file from different hypervisors would work... but as we witnessed, it didn't like the .ova file for VirtualBox.

So, to do some more testing... I clicked on the Windows tab and selected IE11 on Windows 7... VmWare... which produced this link:

https://az412801.vo.msecnd.net/vhd/VMBuild_20141027/VMware/IE11/Windows/IE11.Win7.For.Windows.VMware.zip

I downloaded that, unzipped it... and among the files was a large .vmdk file.  I used virt-v2v to convert that file to a .qcow2 file I could use with KVM.  I had to do a little more reading to get the correct command since it has so many options like connecting to remote hypervisors and using network filesystems... it seems it takes a little effort just to convert a local file. :)  Anyway, I don't remember the exact command line I used and will leave that as an exercise for the reader.

A few comments about the VM I got from Microsoft... and the experience I had... to contrast against some of the things that were said last night:

1) Windows 7 did have a lot of updates (45, reboot, 22, reboot 12) and allowed me to do updates.  When you first open Windows Updates it says there aren't any updates... but that's going off of old info from the time the image was made (circa 2014).  If you click on check for updates, yep... there are bunches... and yep... you CAN update.  At the meeting the impression was given that the image was frozen and not able to be updated.  For that image anyway, that was certainly not the case.  Maybe other images are different?!?

2) Solitaire was not installed by default.  In fact there weren't any games installed at all.  I remember David saying that some games were there.  Either he was joking, or it is another difference between images.  Maybe the XP image does?

3) The desktop background was set to an image that had a bunch of text on it talking about the license the image was under.  Checking the license with the command line tools it mentioned, it appeared the VM was set for 10 days of evaluation... and could be re-armed 5 times.  I would assume each re-arm is 10 days as well?  I'm not sure though as I didn't keep the VM around and destroyed it... but in any event, some images may or may not have more than 30 days of open life to them.  The desktop background did say that Windows 8 and 8.1 did not offer any re-arms at all... and that Windows XP would not give an error message if a re-arm failed.

Anyway, just wanted to share what I learned.

TYL,
-- 
Scott Dowdle
704 Church Street
Belgrade, MT 59714
(406)388-0827 [home]
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