Boot vhd linux physical machine

Вопрос

Rather than partition my drive to install Windows 7 and Ubuntu Linux. I read up about booting a VHD if Windows 7 is installed.

Can someone confirm whether I can create a Linux VHD, and mount this for boot and have the option with the bootloader.

I looked at the following blog to understand how it works http://blogs.technet.com/virtualization/archive/2009/05/14/native-vhd-support-in-windows-7.aspx

I tried to do this and followed instructions in the blog. I now seem to get a bootloader with both Windows 7 and Kubuntu but when I try to boot up Kubuntu it boots windows instead.

I had a Kubuntu virtual machine I created in VMware workstation 7, I then used a free tool called starwind converter which allowed me to convert the VMware VMDK file into a Microsoft VHD.

Can anyone help me on this? Is booting via VHD supported for Linux systems or is it only Windows products?

To clarify, I’m not trying to run Linux in a VM. I’m trying to boot it in my physical machine, from a VHD.

Ответы

Hi, you cannot boot Linux on VHD..

«You can only boot a Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 VHD»

Все ответы

Hi, you cannot boot Linux on VHD..

«You can only boot a Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 VHD»

Just found this thread via Google, so just a quick reply:

Kubuntu has an option, which lets you install kubuntu from within Windows. Just start the kubuntu-DVD/ISO under Win7 and follow instructions. After installation, you have one file (your «vhd») and a Win7 bootloader entry for this kubuntu-file.

It’s possible now, we just released a sample that can boot Ubuntu VHD on Windows/Linus host.

1 Linux as Real Appliance

With VBoot for Linux, you can pre-install and pre-configure Linux OS and its applications

are truly manageable, as simple as files. We call such a Linux VHD to be a real appliance, in the sense that it boots physical computers.

It’s very easy to setup and boot a computer with a vhd file. You download the vhd file, drop it to Windows or Linux file system, then configure the boot loader, and reboot the computer.

2 Linux as Virtual Appliance

The exact same vhd file also runs as a virtual machine using virtualization software , such as VMLite Workstation, VirtualBox, Xen and Virtual PC and Hyper-V, etc. By default, it’s optimized for VMLite Workstation.

If VMLite Workstation is installed, you can simply double click the ubuntu-910-desktop-i386.mop file to launch the vhd as a virtual machine with VMLite Workstation.

3 USB Boot Made Easy

You just need to store the vhd file to usb drive, then hook the USB to different computers to boot.

A sample Ubuntu VHD package is ready for download:

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Deploy Linux into, and boot from, VHD

Since Microsoft Windows 7 came out, the Windows platform has supported a very awesome feature called Native VHD Boot. This allows you to install Windows into a VHDX file, rather than installing it directly onto a physical volume.

Using this configuration, the Windows installation runs entirely on «bare metal» (not inside a hypervisor).

I would like to do something similar with Linux, although I have no experience with doing so. How can I accomplish this?

3 Answers 3

One way would be to use MEMDISK. You can easily create raw images from an existing system using dd or something similar. You can also easily create virtual machines with libvirt / virt-manager or virtualbox to name a few. For example, with virt-manager , you can create a virtual disk and install an operating system to it with an ISO file (among other methods). I am not 100% sure what formats memdisk supports, so I presume that you would be best off using the raw image format with a fixed size allocated up front.

If your goal is simply to have multiple bootable Linux systems on one physical partition, then LVM is a more straightforward choice. This involves creating a physical partition, a logical volume group(s), multiple logical volumes (and file system on each), and installing or copying a system to each (in the latter case, you’ll need to edit grub). It sounds like a lot of steps, but most Linux distribution installers allow you to easily set this up.

I’ve been playing this idea for the past few days and I’ve finally got it to work.

First you need to compile a binary that will mount VHD files. But it can also mount VMDK, VDI and raw disk images. You can get the source to compile this program from here. https://github.com/SophosLabs-zz/vdfuse

But before you compile vdfuse you need to run this command.

libfuse-dev has the required header files for vdfuse to compile.
virtualbox has pre-compiled drivers needed for mounting disk images.
pkg-config is used by a script when compiling vdfuse.
Now with all the required files and binaries, let compile vdfuse.

So the commands you need to run to compile vdfuse are as follows:

Next we need to add some scripts to run before init from within the intird.img.

Create these files as follows:

/usr/share/initramfs-tools/hooks/vdfuse

/usr/share/initramfs-tools/scripts/init-top/vdfuse

/usr/share/initramfs-tools/scripts/init-bottom/vdhost

Next you need to make these files executeable by running the following:

Now we need to build a new kernel using this command: sudo update-initramfs -k all -c

That’s everything you need to do inside Linux. The final thing is setting up grub to boot the virtual disk image.

Here is the commands that need to added to the grub.cfg file.

Change /dev/sda1 to whichever device the VHD resides on.

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