Moving the physical location of a VM (How To Needed)

[rharvey]

I have a Windows 10 VM running on a physical disk mounted inside the UnRaid array, this VM is running BlueIris NVR software and I don't find performance to be acceptable.  I just purchased an SSD that I plan to run the VM on and it will NOT be part of the array.  What would be the steps to simply move this production VM from it's current location over to this new SSD...?

 

Many Thanks for the assistance.

[JonathanM]

Shut down the VM, copy the vdisk image to the new location, change the XML or use the GUI to point the VM to the new location of the vdisk, start the VM.

 

Easy. Now, depending on the format of the new SSD, and how you copy the file, it may change from a sparse file to full size, if it was sparse to begin with. This may or may not be a concern or a bad thing. Some people would rather not run a VM sparse, others won't have it any other way for most instances. Depends on usage and what you want. Sparse means the file has a maximum defined size, but doesn't reserve that full size on the disk, it only uses the amount that is actually allocated.

[billington.mark]

If you want to pass the entire SSD to the VM, the easiest way to achieve this would be:

• -+Take a system image backup in windows 10 (Control panel>backup and recovery>Windows 7 backup>system image backup). save the backup to a share somewhere on unraid. On completion, shut down the VM.
• Change your VM XML, or in the GUI to pass through the SSD, and add the windows 10 installation iso and virtio driver iso to the vm as well.
• Start the VM, boot to the iso, goto recovery options, install the virtio network and storage controller drivers, restore from system image to the passed through SSD.

if you fail miserably, you can reapply the original vdisk back to the vm and boot up again.

[davidlyons24]

Hi! 

 

Where is the XML file located, because in /mnt/user/domains/VMachine/.... there is only the img of the disks.

 

Thank you in advance,

David Lyons

P.D.: After working with VMWare for 20years finally something 100% versatile!

 

[Edit:]

 

I've found them!:

 

/etc/libvirt/qemu

 

 

 

Edited April 3, 2019 by davidlyons24
I've found the answer to my question