Is it possible to passthrough a physical disk with an OS installed and use it in a VM guest?

[hoppel118]

Hi,

Debian OS (Stretch) is installed bare metal on the SSD of my server. There are also a lot of Docker Containers configured. My home automation software (FHEM) is installed to the bare metal Debian OS directly. Its not that easy to migrate this to a VM, because I have a lot of FHEM modules in use which were installed by different methods (apt, curl, nodejs/npm, git clone, whatever).

Now I want to clean up my setup. As a temporary solution I want to do the following:

Is it possible to passthrough the SSD with the Debian OS to a VM guest and start this OS within the VM guest instead of a new OS on a virtualised hard disk?

If not, what are my alternatives? Is it possible to "clone" that SSD to an image file (raw/qcow2/img/whatever) and use this instead?

Are there any howtos or documentations to do this?

Thanks Hoppel

 

[leesteken]

Maybe physical disk passthrough or migration of servers to Proxmox Wiki pages can get you started?

 

[hoppel118]

Thank you. I already knew the two links. But unfortunately I didn't really get any further with them.

I found the following post on reddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Proxmox/comments/l9ksze/boot_and_run_a_vm_from_a_physical_disk_taken_from/

So my procedure maybe as follows:

1. Setup Proxmox on a new disk
2. Configure a KVM guest
3. qm set <VM-ID> -sata0 /dev/disk/by-id/<my-transplanted-ssd-id>
4. make that sata0 the boot device
5. detach&delete the scsi1 created when creating the VM

Maybe my SSD is not sata0.

What do you think about it?

 

[mr44er]

Maybe my SSD is not sata0.

This must not represent the physical disk or what it is.
You could also use qm set <VM-ID> -scsi0 or qm set <VM-ID> -virtio0, it depends on the used OS inside the vm and the corressponding disk controller you give it.

Also check this link and read the comments: https://dannyda.com/2020/08/26/how-to-passthrough-hdd-ssd-physical-disks-to-vm-on-proxmox-vepve/