Virtualizing a running system

[John Boland]

jerry,
while you didn't specifically include vmware products, i hope they are
included in your ellipsis.  vmware has a windows executable p2v that will do
what you want.  you can then load image into vmware.
HTH

On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 10:56 AM, Jerry Feldman <gaf-mNDKBlG2WHs at public.gmane.org> wrote:

> I would like to be able to take an OEM version of Windows installed on a
> computer, back it up, install Linux with some virtualization manager, such
> as Virtualbox, KVM/QEMU, Xen ...  (ignoring Microsoft's OEM license issue).
>  Let's say we have a person running Windows with plenty of installed
> applications. What I would like to be able to do would be to somehow
> encapsulate that version into a VDI. The end result is that the system would
> be running Linux and the target Windows system would be running in a virtual
> machine under that version of Linux. It is certainly possible to do it the
> other way around, but that is not the objective. Additionally, we don't want
> to have to reinstall the applications. I'm not concerned about how to stage
> it, such as install a second HD, install Linux (Fedora, Ubuntu, SuSE) and
> set up an initial dual boot. The issue comes down to taking an installed,
> running Windows (XP or Vista) and importing it into a VM. At one point
> Win4Lin had a way of being able to use the existing installed version of
> Windows, but that Windows remained in its own partition.
>
> There are a number of reasons to do this. One reason is backup. You can
> make copies of the VDI (and snapshots) on your backup media. Another might
> be that you want to use the stability of the Linux file systems. Another
> reason is that you need to move to another hardware platform, but you need
> to preserve your copy of Windows to run some legacy applications that may no
> longer exist or you lost the install media, or those apps only run on say
> Windows NT, but not XP. For whatever reason the goal is to have Windows
> running in a virtual machine in the same state as it was when it was native.
>
> --
> Jerry Feldman <gaf-mNDKBlG2WHs at public.gmane.org>
> Boston Linux and Unix
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>
>
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