I currently have my Raspberry Pi running OctoPi, connected to my 3D printer. No issues there. I'm wanting to upgrade the Raspberry Pi & printer to run Klipper but was wondering if it's possible to set up a VM in Unraid to do the actual OS build for it on a thumb drive, then once I've got it installed, just move that thumb drive to the Rpi? The only real reason I'm thinking about doing it this way is because everytime I blink, I find something else to print, which means the OS upgrade has to wait.

wiht the unasign disk plugin to verify the usb media you can run dd and other pri images to the flash device / sd carfd for the pie directly on unraid no host.

I would encoruge a host do it and not a VM. I have had issues with passing sotrage medai and not being able to read, write or format drives past though a VM from unraid to my VM... Havent tested in a while but would involve passing a USB PCIE Device ports and all...

so if you have a usb to sd card reader.
https://www.raspberrypi.com/software/operating-systems/#raspberry-pi-os-32-bit

downald your image
https://downloads.raspberrypi.com/raspios_lite_armhf/images/raspios_lite_armhf-2025-05-13/2025-05-13-raspios-bookworm-armhf-lite.img.xz

extract it and run a dd comand to write the image to your USB sd Card...
!!! dd is a powerfull and destructive tool!!! make sure you have the path corect for image and where your writing...

Then yes you can use the unraid host to make a pi sd card image....

sadly I'm not away of unraid abilty to edit mount and use a libvirt vdisk image to make a disk image.

I would asume one could once the VM is setup and use something like clone zilla
https://clonezilla.org/clonezilla-live.php

to make a VM root Disk image conected to a unraid smb share... this way you have a image to write...


BUT!!! The issue you have is that the OS you ran and installed on unraid VM is a x86 and not ARM so it will not boot and packages would need installed for ARM...

in theory but by the time you set it up it would have ben better to have 1 day down ime to mess with the pie...

You can’t directly run x86 VM images on ARM.

Option A: Rebuild the Environment on Raspberry Pi (Recommended)

If you don’t absolutely need the exact VM disk image and just want the same services, files, and environment, this is by far the easiest and cleanest way:

1. Flash Raspberry Pi OS (64-bit) or Debian 12 ARM onto SD card.

2. Boot the Pi.

3. Manually install your services/packages (e.g. MySQL, Nginx, Docker).

4. Copy over:

   • Your config files (e.g. /etc/, /home/user/, /var/www/, etc.)

   • Any scripts or data from the old VM.

5. (Optional) Use Docker Compose or Ansible to automate it going forward.

6. You can use rsync or scp for migration

   1. rsync -avz user@oldvm:/etc/myconfig /etc/myconfig

Option B: Emulate x86 on ARM (Slow, Not Recommended for Production)

You can technically run your x86 VM on the Pi using QEMU, but:

• It’s very slow

• Not all guest OSes behave well

• You may have to convert your VM image (like .vmdk or .qcow2) to a QEMU-supported format

• qemu-system-x86_64 \

  -hda yourimage.qcow2 \

  -m 1024 \

  -cpu host \

  -enable-kvm

Good luck

Edited June 19, 20251 yr by bmartino1