After all of the Windows and Linux virtual machines I have setup I decided to try a Windows p2v (Physical to Virtual) conversion. After bracing for the worst it ended up being fairly straight forward. Steps as follows:

1. Create a disk image of sufficient size
2. Copy the Windows HDD to the disk image
3. Boot the image with KVM

Yip. Only three steps. Beware that Windows p2v images have all run quite slow for me compared to Windows images that were originally installed in KVM. This I guess is just because of the cruft buildup in Windows and all the driver changes that Windows seems to balk at so much.

Although these instructions are written using Window XP as the guest image, it will work equally (extremely) well for Linux too. The only exception with linux being that you can substitute the clonezilla step for a straight tar copy of the images. Using clonezilla for Windows and Linux though reduces the number of different steps to remember. (more…)