On 05/17/2016 05:49 AM, Rob Kampen wrote:
On 17/05/16 22:38, James Hogarth wrote:
On 17 May 2016 at 09:11, Rob Kampen rkampen@kampensonline.com wrote:
On 17/05/16 19:58, John Hodrien wrote:
On Tue, 17 May 2016, Rob Kampen wrote:
No idea where to from here, so if there is anyone that has a working
systemd autostart VirtualBox setup on a headless CentOS 7 server - please advise what you have done to get it working.
I deliberately bailed on VirtualBox when we moved to C7, as KVM offered everything I needed with less hassle.
I take it you've considered switching?
Considered, very briefly. I have had great success and stability with
running VirtualBox on both CentOS 5 & 6 for the few Windoze apps that my clients need to run and have up on a server 24x7. The set ups I am using have been running reliably for over 8 years and remote manged with zero issues - HUGE thanks to the CentOS team for an awesome OS system delivery Thus, I have simply installed the latest VirtualBox on CentOS 7 and gone from there. I was aware that systemd existed and deliberately waited until this year to upgrade the hardware and OS, thinking issues like this should have been sorted by now. Are there any good tutorial / howtos for KVM? Although at this point I am back on another continent and reluctant to shift to KVM when over 20 hours fly time away from the server.
Why would that be an issue? It's not Xen where you have to boot into a special kernel ... it's just the ordinary kernel. In fact I'd be surprised if you had to reboot at all, you should just have to install the virtualization group (along with virt-tools and virt-manager to make your life easier, dont' forget to install fonts if using virt-manager over X forward and wanting to avoid little boxes instead of characters) and be up and running.
thanks James. I have started working through the document you indicated and will see how it goes. It may take a few days to sort out enough time. BTW, will I be able to use the Windows10 image file that VirtualBox uses? Is there a tool that changes the format of the vm image if its different? Or am I faced with a new Windoze install and installing the Windoze Apps all over again? That may be an issue as the Windoze application is quite complex and the last two times I have installed it, I had to use the app provider's help line to solve Windoze 10 issues as the default install has some things that need changing in order for their app to work.
You can convert a Virtual Box VM into a KVM VM, it is a 2 step process. First is to convert ALL the drives to RAW format, then convert them to qcow2 image.
If you only have one drive for the VM, it is fairly easy. Here is one of many links from google:
https://kuther.net/content/convert-virtualbox-kvmqemu
Lots of other links available as well.
The qemu-img in centos 7 can do this in one step instead of 2 though ...
qemu-img convert -f vdi -O qcow2 vm.vdi vm.qcow2
(You would substitute your actual vdi file name for vm.vdi and name the output file whatever you want instead of vm.qcow2).
Once you have a qcow2 file, you just import it in virt-manager and it should work.