[colug-432] KVM management

[Greg Sidelinger]

I do have some 98 vmware guests laying around that I boot up every so
often when updating an installer for a company.  I think last time I
needed to create it from scratch windows update would not even work
with IE 5 because it was so old.



On Wed, Aug 8, 2012 at 1:06 PM, R P Herrold <herrold at owlriver.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 8 Aug 2012, Joshua Kramer wrote:
>
>> One thing to consider when using KVM with Windows guests is the
>> drivers.  KVM has hardware support for virtualized VGA and IDE
>> interfaces; however, those are slow.  In their place are "hardware"
>> components called QXL and VIRTIO.  There are kernel drivers for most
>> modern Linux distributions for these devices, so when you set up a VM
>> you can select those right off the bat.
>
> There is an upstream: virtio-win
>
> My notes indicate that:
>         http://alt.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/virtio-win/latest/images/
> is a prime site, and I anticipate experimenting on this as
> well
>
> My _real_ goal here is to see if I can get Windows 95 and
> Windows NT 3.51 into KVM VM's -- the 'virt-p2v' migration
> tools turn up their nose and sniff at such an old pair of
> installations ... but they are the last physical Windows boxes
> at my office, used to run an ancient QuickBooks Pro, and a
> third-party HP-PCL print-driver interceptor that spits out
> bank-ready MICR line check images
>
> For historical reasons (small drives of the era) I used
> 'network neighborhood' SMB file directory sharing to get the
> space I needed at the time.  Ditto, SMB printer drivers, as
> Windows 95 did not really want to do LPR back at that era
>
> Intuit has a relentless 'upgrade treadmill' so I have not much
> hope in moving thirty years of check register data into the
> present, AND still write my own MICR checks on blank
> checkstock.  But mebbe KVM will get me there
>
> -- Russ herrold
> _______________________________________________
> colug-432 mailing list
> colug-432 at colug.net
> http://lists.colug.net/mailman/listinfo/colug-432