Migrating a VirtualBox Windows Virtual Machine to QEMU/KVM/virt-manager (Shallow Thoughts)

Migrating a VirtualBox Windows Virtual Machine to QEMU/KVM/virt-manager

A month ago I wrote about Getting virt-manager Running on Debian. The ultimate goal of this was to migrate my Windows 10 install from VirtualBox to QEMU, because VirtualBox is becoming increasingly difficult to install on Linux, especially on Debian, which has removed VirtualBox from Bookworm (testing) and there are indications that it might be removed from Sid (unstable) as well. I gather there's something unsavory about the license now that Oracle owns it, but I haven't been following the details.

Anyway, after getting virt-manager running, I'd been putting off the rest of the migration out of a suspicion that there lay dragons. I was right: it took several days of struggling, but I now have Windows 10 working under virt-manager and qemu/kvm. Here's how.

Read more ...