Fedora 14 convert VMWare to KVM

Agave Virtual Machine On Fedora

It was the simplest thing that I have done on a Linux box.  I thought it would be real complicated and would not work, boy was I wrong.  It use to be that only macho super geeks could run Linux, now even a cave man can do it,



For starters I wanted to take my existing Windows Vista box and convert it to a virtual machine and then run it  on a Linux box.  This seems simple enough but it took me almost two years to do it. Granted there were a lot of technical software changes in the last two years to make this happen on  my existing hardware.  In fact I tried this two years ago and I could not get it to work because of driver issues with the Intel BIOS RAID that was not supported by any Linux distribution at the time.



The release of Fedora 14 and Red Hat 6 is what pushed me to try doing this once more. My goal all along was to preserve the landscape design software running on Vista so that my wife could use it if she had to.  If this was my data I would have not been so cautious about preserving software on an operating system the data.  Since I was treating this like a real world situation where data is critical I wanted to make sure it worked.  When I make up a game it is always fun to stick to some rules to make it fun. I knew that I could convert a physical machine to a virtual machine using VMware tools.  Heck I knew that I could run virtual machines like I do at work with the suite of software from VMware.  What I wanted to do was to use all free software to do it.  I am happy to say that it works.


Here are links to what helped me along the way

1. Create your virtual machine from a physical machine (P2V) using VMWare's free software.


2. Copy virtual machine to an external USB drive.


3. Grab a copy of Fedora 14 Live and configure your server.  If you have BIOS RAID use an IDE drive for the GRUB boot loader.


4. Read the tutorial for virtual machine management on the Fedora Wiki.


5. Copy VMware virtual machine files to Linux box


6. Convert the VMware virtual machine to KVM format.


7. Start Virtual Machine Manager and import your converted file.


8. Use the Microsoft phone support to re-activate your license of Windows if you only want one copy.

I am glad to have gone through so many versions of Linux since 1992 to appreciate the hard work that the world wide community of developers to make Linux so wonderful to work with. Sure I have had many long nights struggling to get Linux to do what I wanted to do and most of the time it was because I did not know what I was doing. This installation of KVM and the process of converting a VMware file to work with KVM was a piece of cake. I am so happy I can now go back to finish my drawing.