April 15, 201412 yr May I setup XEN on 1 physical machine - change the motherboard / cpu / chipset out - and run the VM on the new hardware? VM 0 - Unraid (on FLASH) VM 1 - Windows 7 x64 (on SSD) VM 2 - Ubuntu LTS (14 to be released on friday - on SSD) Thanks!
April 15, 201412 yr I don't use XEN, but all VM Hosts that I've used in the past allow this. As long as your new hardware can do all the same things that your old hardware could do (i.e. pass through), there's no reason it shouldn't work. The hardware definitions for the guests should be specified in a file for the guest, that indicates what disks it uses (and what files they're stored in), what hardware is emulated, etc. There may be an export/import function that needs to be used to facilitate the moving of the VM.
April 15, 201412 yr Other than potential issues with passthrough, I don't see why not. It shouldn't be any different than swapping hardware in a regular computer. I did upgrade my cpu from a sempron to a phenom. The vms recognized the new cpu right away. I didn't have to do anything
April 15, 201412 yr You *should* be okay as long as you stick with Intel or AMD (whichever you have now). UnRAID potentially won't care, and your Ubuntu may be fine too, but your Windows VM may face issues moving between vendors. Just recognize that you may need to rebuild the Windows VM as a worst case scenario and you should be fine (it may not be an issue either, but it is definitely the most finicky of OSs).
April 15, 201412 yr Author Thanks everyone - the lowest IMPACT to my current situation is to build the VM images on a spare dell T3500 server (xeon E5506) with 3 GB of ram and a ATI HD 3450 - then move the unraid stick & Cache Drive to my i5-2500/Asus P8H77-V LE machine/16GB/AMD HD 7750. Also - I see that Windows 7 is no good for passthrough so I have a 8.1 Pro - Full disk coming my way.
April 15, 201412 yr Also - I see that Windows 7 is no good for passthrough so I have a 8.1 Pro - Full disk coming my way. It's my understanding that what doesn't work with Windows 7 is GPU pass through. I know others have used Windows 7 and have passed through other PCIe cards. The only problems I've heard about are with GPUs.
April 16, 201412 yr Author The windows VM is for 2 things 1 - Grabbing the DVD ISO's of movies that I purchase 2 - Playing (and streaming) my Steam Library ---so I am fairly certain the GPU pass-through is a must I also plan on making a copy of the Clean/Fresh VM so that I can have a ready to go clean install every few months
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.