Windows machines lost their Activation - what can you do to prevent this.
Cannot resize Virtual Machine Window - tried many choices with the Auto resize VM with window checked but none resize.
The conversion of the VDI to qcow2 went smooth - the suse15 VM - I had to change to SATA to get it to fully boot. They seem to be working like in VirtualBox.
I still need to figure out how to put them to sleep for to do backups and restart them after backing up. I really need to script this - any help would be appreciated.
Windows activation - Common problem. Call the MS anti-piracy hotline and they’ll work with you to fix the problem. Happens plenty of times, just be sure that you are legal before calling them, of course. Most retail licenses can be moved from one machine to another but OEM licenses cannot… But if the Windows license came with your machine that’s now running openSUSE and you want to re-install or deploy the OEM liceense in a virtual machine on the same hardware you should be good.
For Windows - I have the Key for all the Windows 10 and reapplying the keys reactivated them fine - the problem is Windows XP , Vista and 7 - Microsoft will not reactivate them any longer - My XP should not be an issue as I removed all the Microsoft checks years ago - It never checks for validation - it is happy on SP3 without internet access.
For the resize - I found that there in the Virtual Machine Manager > Edit > Properties > console > you have to select Resize Guest to On - for windows you have to download and install spice-guest-tools to get dynamic window sizes. I found by trial and error to use QXL for windows and Virtio for Opensuse in the Video.
Now I am trying to figure out how to boot from a USB install to update OpenSUSE that I carry to fix issues and do restores - in VirtualBox - I created a .vmdk to point to the /dev/sdx# that is the USB drive - It looks like you have to find the USB id from lsusb to do that in KVM and use that id.
I think I figured out how to save and restore each VM between reboots - I just have to test my scripts to validate that they work as good as my VirtualBox scripts did.
I still have to figure out how to mount a file to the Windows XP like the VirtualBox shared folders can do - when I have these I can be VirtualBox free.
When you talk to Microsoft Anti-Piracy, if you have a legitimate license they’ll advise how to address your problem. It’s not always re-activation, I’ve heard that they might suggest addressing a number of ways.
Am not clear what you are updating with your USB… physical machines or virtual machines. Should be possible either way although details might be slightly different. IMO least complex way should be to simply configure the machine (physical or virtual) to point to the USB device as a repository (similar to initial install which configures your original install source). In fact, if can be formatted ISO-9660, then your then I’d image you can check the box in Guest settings to enable/disable the “virtual cdrom” instead of having to re-mount periodically.
As for sharing the filesystem between HostOS and Guest,
last night in that other post on this topic in this Forum the past few days added a link to a new command line method descrbed in the openSUSE documentation.
I have various bootable USB (32gb and larger) with Ubuntu, Mint, Centos and Opensuse installed either legacy or UEFI on individual USB drives that I keep updated that can be used to run off of or to restore from offline tar backups. For Opensuse - I update them every day that there are patches. Weekly for the others. I use then to show different flavors of Linux to people on their systems - All I have to do is plug Ethernet in or their wi-fi access. Most like Opensuse 15.2 with MATE, some Ububtu, some Mint. Noone picks Centos - I have a lot of machines that Centos will not boot up on - they were behind on new processor support. I also hate Nvidia Laptops - what a pain.
I show that LibreOffice an open and modify their Office files and they can see the internet just like Windows 10 that they hate. It is ironic that the USB3.0 drives I use are sometimes faster than the vendor supplied Windows 10 on their computer. Many have slow rpm drives that we use as storage and run off the USB3.0 flash drive. Walmart and Best Buy low cost laptops with USB 3 ports are great candidates for this “upgrade”.
I will go looking for the entry for mounting a host directory to a KVM windows xp guest.