First off, let me make it clear I am running QEMU non-accelerated here, I don’t have a CPU that supports VT-X so qemu-kvm won’t work for me.
And before anybody says VirtualBox is a lot faster than QEMU in a non-VT-X environment, VirtualBox will not do what I want, in fact I find it very unfriendly, I couldn’t get it to recognize my external hard drive as a valid USB device at all. And yes I did play with VMWare for a while many years ago, I’ll avoid that as well thanks.
Ahh, Restore, thats why I need the USB support. QEMU version 0.12.5 handles my USB devices perfectly. As I am trying to restore a backup into a VM from a backup made to the external USB drive, it obviously has to be QEMU I will use, it’s the only one that can see my USB devices.
Anyway. VirtualBox to restore a Clonezilla backup on an external USB hard disk into a VM image is a big fail. QEMU on the other hand just works.
The only issue I have is without acceleration the looong wait time. The restore estimated time was flicking between 23hrs and 35mins for the first 30mins of the restore, it’s now stabilised at around 18hrs to do the restore (I used this backup image to recover to a new non-VM hard disk and it only took 2hrs, so not having KQemu is a pain).
But it will probably work.
VirtualBox just can’t manage it.
And as I have to use QEMU I have made the target disk a QCOW image so I can compress it (as we all know the compress virtual disk image fuctions were removed from virtualbox, qemu still has them) so my 80Gb restore will probably be only about 15Gb once I compress it, when it eventually, eventually, eventually, restores back down.
Sigh, I stupidly gave the VM 1Gb of memory (it only needed 256M), the system has started using paging space, it could be a while.
90% through now, looks like a 80Gb disk that wss 25% used will only need a 7Gb virtual disk, and of course with QEMU (unlike VirtualBox) you can recompact virtual drived as needed. And of course QEMU is portable, if this restore is sucessfull the VM will be moved to a USB key.
