Greetings,
With the purchase of VMware by Broadcom, I am now VERY unhappy. I am looking at replacing it with something in the SUSE family. Can anyone tell me some options with an [open]SUSE product that can do containers and VMs? I want to find a good, robust solution. Any advice would be appreciated.
I feel your pain but it seems OpenSUSE KVM/Qemu may not be our savior. I have used libvirt in the past for some server virtualization but I have struggled to do something as simple as converting a base XP vm between VMware workstation and Qemu. All I can manage to get out of it is a boot screen before it BSOD’s. I have a few dozen VM’s with older operating systems that I keep. If compatibility is this raw though I don’t see it as a solution. There is a huge opportunity for VM market share to whoever steps up to the plate to fill the VMware void. I don’t see how Broadcom can avoid anti-trust at this point, there are no other true players in the SMB market which Broadcom has wholesale abandoned.
@GofBorg You might have to look at the xml info and tweak, XP is rather old… 
I have no idea what that is but I’ll look into it.
I was able to boot it fairly easily with VirtualBox but I trust Oracle about as much as Broadcom.
Do you know if there is a way to look at the working VirtualBox settings and export those for use with Qemu?
In our firm we converted all our VM from VMWare to KVM/QEMU except for XP machines.
We got your same results and we tried to solve the issue related to SCSI/IDE driver without success (there a lot of web pages that explain how to solve but we were unable to fix it).
We were more lucky in creating, from scratch, Win XP machine …
I’ve to say that KVM/QEMU is more flexible and usable that VMWare (player) on linux. And you even don’t have to wait (and to hope) that someone make a new patch every time there is a new kernel version.
Seems rather silly that Virtualbox will crank up my XP disks but QEMU barfs all over itself. I’ve been digging around most of the day but most information I can find relates to installing WinXP fresh not simply firing up a set of working disks. Since I can still load this machine it should be trivial to add in any missing drivers, I just need to know where to begin. Not finding much of anything that is relevant. Tried munging around in the xml but most of the documents I have found are rather dated and do not reflect current options.
I think I have it down to this as the issue:
<disk type="file" device="disk">
<driver name="qemu" type="vmdk"/>
<source file="/home/disk2/XP/XP.vmdk"/>
<target dev="hda" bus="ide"/>
</disk>
I need a drivername that equates to PIIX4 which is what Virtualbox is using to boot.
The default value is “qemu” but I suspect others are available.
@GofBorg I see for a qcow image;
<disk type="file" device="disk">
<driver name="qemu" type="qcow2" cache="unsafe" discard="unmap"/>
<source file="/var/lib/libvirt/images/winxp.qcow2" index="2"/>
<backingStore/>
<target dev="hda" bus="ide"/>
<alias name="ide0-0-0"/>
<address type="drive" controller="0" bus="0" target="0" unit="0"/>
</disk>
Have a look at the vmdk settings QEMU block drivers reference — QEMU documentation
I think qemu is too raw for me to use. Spent a few days on this but can’t come up with a winning solution. Thanks for the help Malcolm.
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