[SOLVED] Noob question: boot and run a VM from a physical disk taken from a real machine.

[JanCri]

Hi,
I just did my first install of PVE on an old PC with one HDD. I understand that's not the recommended config but that's all i have for now. I created a couple VMs fine.

Now i have in another multiboot PC a SATA SSD from which i boot Kubuntu. And i would like to take that SSD and install it on the PVE machine then create a VM that would boot and run directly (passthrough) from that SSD. I do not want to create a virtual disk from that SSD.

I searched and found the following that seems relevant:

https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Passthrough_Physical_Disk_to_Virtual_Machine_(VM)

So i was thinking of doing:
- create a VM with a VirstIO SCSI + regular virtual disk (say scsi0)
- Shell: 'qm set VM-ID -scsi1 /dev/disk/by-id/<my-transplanted-ssd-id>'
- Then from the webui, make scsi1 the VM boot device and probably get rid of the scsi0 created when the VM was created.

1) Since i don't know at all what i am doing, i would like confirmation, comments or pointers.
2) If things go side way with the old hardware running PVE, could i take the SSD, install it back on my other PC and boot from it and run happily?

Thank you in advance.

EDIT:
I did pretty much as above but used 'qm set <VM-ID> -sata0 /dev/disk/by-id/<my-transplanted-ssd-id>', made sata0 the boot device, detach&delete the scsi1 created when creating the VM. And it all seems to work fine.
Thanks!

 

[Hannes Laimer]

Hey,

what you wrote seems fine. And yes, you can just put the SSD in your PC and boot from it. Alternatively, you can convert your system to a VM, basically, your system is copied into a new VM instead of passing through an existing disk[1]. Converting might result in slightly better performance than the passthrough method, and allows live migration if that is of any concern for you.

[1] https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Migration_of_servers_to_Proxmox_VE#Physical-to-Virtual_.28P2V.29

 

[JanCri]

Thanks for the confirmation. Yes, when i eventually get a proper PC setup, i plan to move to a VM with a virtual disk. But in the meantime with my current hardware, i will try the pass-thru disk then.
Best,