New Age Vertualization

Continued from page: 1

Wednesday, May 07, 2008

The Microsoft Hypervisor
Around 4 months back, we had talked about the first publicly available Hypervisor from Microsoft. The news floating then was that, it was just going to be a component or Role in Windows Server 2008 and will be called Windows Hypervisor. But recently, with the RTM release of Windows Server 2008 we saw the latest avatar of Windows Hypervisor which is now called the HyperV. Yes, it still comes as a Windows Sever 2008 role. Currently only a beta version of HyperV is available and we are expecting the full release somewhere in the third quarter of this year. Today you can't buy a copy of Windows Server 2008 for your production servers along with HyperV because it is still in its beta. But if you want to give it a try you can download a trial version of it along with windows server2008 x64 RTM. We also did that.

For installing HyperV you will ofcourse require a machine which has either an Intel VT or AMD V processor. The maximum number of cores the host machine can take is 16 and the current max ram support is 64GB. Further you can allocate 4 cores to a single virtual machine running inside HyperV. The installation is pretty straight forward. First, do the installation of Windows Server 2008, then open up the Add Role Wizard and select the HyperV option. Once you do that the machine will require a reboot. This is the point where the hypervisor is slipped between the hardware and the OS making it a full virtualization system. Once the machine boots back, it will run a standard wizard and will install the required files and frontend for the system. Once done, you are ready to use it. One more good news is that you can natively run any virtual machine created with MS VPC or MS Virtual Server on HyperV without doing any modification. All you have to do is to copy the existing VHD file to the machine with HyperV and boot it with the HyperV. That's really a great thing for those who will be migrating from MS Virtual Server or MS VPC to HyperV.

But if you want to migrate from some other virtualization environment to HyperV then you have to use the VMM or Virtual Machine manager for HyperV. It is going to be released after a month of the final release of HyperV. VMM for HyperV, very similar to VMM 2007 for MS Virtual Server will be capable of converting from a physical machine to virtual machines or virtual machines (other virtualization environment) to HyoerV virtual environment. But yet, no public beta is available for it and hence we still haven't given it a try. Once we get hold of it, we will surely come back to you with an article on it. But for those who can't wait to know more about virtualization interiop, here is the how-to.

The Interop dance
Is interop in virtual environments taking away your sleeps. Then this section is for you. Following one by one we will see how you can convert any environment to any other virtual environment.
Physical to MS VPC/MS VS/MS HyperV

The easiest option to do so will be by using a 30-day trial full functional tool called WinImage. So that you don't have to pay any extra money for this. You can download it from http://ourworld. compuserve.com/homepages/Gvollant/download.htm. To start with, take the hard-disk of the machine you want to create the VM Image of and connect it as a secondary hard-disk to the machine where you've installed WinImage. Go to Disks Menu and click on the Option that says 'Create Virtual Disk Image from Physical Disk...' This opens the Physical to Virtual wizard. Follow the instruction and your physical harddisk will beconverted to a vhd file. Wasn't that simple.

A lightweight tool to convert your VMware appliance into MS Virtual Hard disks	Notice that the WinImage is actually running in a WinXP instance which is running virtually inside VirtualBox

Physical to VMware
This is a free tool from VMWare called VMWare Converter. Download it from VMWare's website and you are on. This is a pretty feature rich tool which can migrate any physical machine running Windows OS connected over the network to a VMWare appliance. It can also convert appliances create by MS VPC/VS to VMWare appliance plus it can even read backup images such as Symantec backup images and can convert them to VMWare virtual machines.

If you are connected through ADS then all you need to do is to start the converter's Import machine wizard from the main interface and select the option which says “Physical Computer”. Once you proceed it will ask you for the IP address of the machine which you want to convert into virtual and of course its credentials so that it can connect to the machine and read the harddisk. Once you provide it all the necessary information, it will create the virtual harddisk over the network and save it to your local machine.

From MS Virtual Server/VPC/HyperV to VMWare
Well, it's not actually required because VMWare products can natively recognize and run MS VHD files. So you don't actually need to convert them to run on VMWare platform. But still if you want to do it then use the same VMWare convert software. It can not only convert your MS VPC/VS appliances but can also convert Symantec backup images. All you have to do is to run the same import machine wizard which we used in the section three, but this time select the third option which says “Stand Alone Virtual machine/ backup or disk image” and proceed. It will ask you to provide the path of the file vhd file, do that and your vhd is converted into vmdk.

From VMWare to Virtual Server/VPC/HyperV
This one is also a free tool and is available from http://vmtoolkit.com/files/ folders/converters/entry8.aspx. its called the vmdk converter. Using it is as simple as downloading, unpacking and running it. It will open up a file browser interface. Here just browse and locate any vmdk image and say ok. And believe it or not that's all you have to do for it. But one important thing which we would like to bring to your notice is that, this tool doesn't come with any warranty. And we also faced some errors while converting images to vhd using this tool. Where the tool just used to crash in between the process of conversion. But it still works in most of the cases. So go ahead and give it a try. If it works, great! Else better click next time.

VirtualBox to Virtual Server or VMWare
If, you have PCQLinux appliance or for that matter any other VirtualBox appliance but don't want to shift to virtualbox for running them? Then here is the trick. Officially there is no tool which converts a VirtualBox image into a VMware or a Microsoft Virtual disk format which is VHD. But still you can do it by some nasty tricks. And believe me it works.

So you must be wondering, how to do it. Ok, then let's take the first case. You want to convert a virtualbox appliance into a vhd appliance. To begin with, first get hold of a virtualbox virtual machine which is running windows XP. Now add the VirtualBox appliance which you want to convert to virtual vhd as a second harddisk to the virtual XP machine. Now install WinImage on top of the virtual XP machine and follow the process mentioned in section 1. The winimage software will treat the windows XP running on VirtualBox as a physical machine and will convert the second harddisk attached to it (which is essentially a virtualbox image), when selected into a vhd file.

Similarly if you want to convert a VirtualBox appliance into a VMWare appliance, then do exactly as mentioned above just instead of installing winimage on top of the virtual XP machine, this time install the VMWare Converter and follow the section 2.

NOTE: This trick is so simple and effective that you practically can convert any appliance created by any virtualization environment such as XEN or even qemu or any for that matter into vhd or vmdk. We still haven't given them a try by. If you ever give it a try then please let us know your experiences at http://forums. pcquest.com

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