The Ghost Operator's Signal
Migrating just a couple of virtual machines from other virtualization platforms to KVM is easy. Virtualbox uses the Virtual Disk Image (.vdi) format. You can clone the vdi image to a RAW image format using vboxmanage. This way you will not alter your original virtual image file. Then QEMU provides the necessary tools to convert the RAW image to the qcow2 format. Qcow2 is QEMU’s Copy On Write image format.
VirtualBox is a general-purpose full virtualizaton for x86 hardware, targeted at server, desktop and embedded use. The VirtualBox Guest Additions are extra pieces of software that enable better performance and functionality in virtual machines.
We install Guest Additions inside the virtual machine to activate this functionality. In VirtualBox, we can install Guest Additions by selecting Devices > Insert Guest Additions CD Image on the toolbar at the top of our guest OS window. This mounts a virtual disc to the VM. When we do this, our guest OS will respond as if we’ve just inserted a physical disc.
Here’s my example playbook that we can use to install Virtualbox Guest Additions on Debian Bullseye after installing the OS.
Continue reading “Installing VirtualBox Guest Additions on a Debian Bullseye VM with an Ansible playbook”
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