Daniel Bareiro wrote:
> Hi all!
>
> A client who has a dermatology center currently uses a patient
> management system that works on Windows. This system is installed on a
> computer with a single disk.
>
> I'm thinking of offering a migration of this system to a virtual machine
> with KVM on Debian Jessie using software raid 1 with two disks and
> mdadm. I think this would give a level of contingency that they now have
> not given if that disk fails; they could have a very large dead time by
> having to install the operating system, the medical management software
> and then restore the backup.
>
> I have also gotten some feedback saying Windows works better with KVM
> than with physical hardware, although it is not something I have
> validated because I don't use Windows regularly.
>
> I was thinking of making an image of the current disk using "dd" (I
> could even convert the raw disk to qcow if on this way the access is
> more efficient), to start the KVM virtual machine with this disk image,
> but I have doubts whether Windows might fail on the starting process
> when discovering the hardware has changed.
>
> I would like to know what opinions you have about it.
>
>
I've not done this with KVM, but with XP and 7 it was not a big issue to
move into virtual machine vmware/player (we used a ghost image back then).
As the drivers provided by vmware are supported out of the box by windows
it is able to discover and load the proper drivers for the virtual
hardware - usually going into admin mode updating drivers and booting in
normal + updating drivers.
There were occasionally issues where we had to go through the windows
recovery doing an update to reinitialize the boot process.
What you probably should pay attention is the disk type (sata/ide).
If you can not boot, use windows recovery. If you boot but get blue screen,
go into admin mode or again windows recovery (this overwrites the base
system). Do not mix this with system recovery offered by some vendors.
In your case I would offer to try it for free and in case of success,
collect the award.
Alternatively if it is only about RAID, windows supports raid as well, so
make a backup, add 2nd disk, raid and restore from backup. If it is a
rather modern mainboard the hard disk controller could have built-in raid
support.
I hope this helps
regards