OK, so I’m mulling the move from Xen to KVM. This initially looked like I’d have to make duplicate virtual disks in KVM for my Xen guests, then shut the guests down, block copy content across and patch up MBR and boot my physical box into a stock kernel and hope KVM comes up with the goods.
Well, a little bit of experimentation with a rarely-used VM and I’ve found much to my joy that because I used LVM logical volumes to create my Xen guests virtual disks, I can use kpartx to add device mapping for them and (when the guest is safely shut down!) mount them up in my dom0 and read/write to them. Thi sis good news because it means they have a full virtual disk setup, with a /boot partition, a root partition and a swap partition all living in a single logical volume. This means KVM should pick them straight up and work with them unmodified.
Which hopefully means all I have to do is set a stock kernel to be the boot default in my guests, shut them down, set my dom0 to boot from a stock kernel, load up the KVM kernel module and add some guests from the logical volumes.
If it’s that easy, I’ll be a happy person indeed!
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