Final edit: I got all the Linux stuff right but made a dumb mistake generating the image on the Windows side. Watching the VM boot right now. Thanks to all for your support!
cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/15860280
Contemplating Fedora Kinoite for work daily driver. Need to prove that I can virtualize an existing physical Windows 11 machine. Using Bazzite on a personal laptop as a host test bed.
Test host seems to be set up correctly. I layered the packages in the virtualization group, layered virtio-win (from downloaded rpm package), added my user to the libvert group, and enabled libvirtd. After a reboot or two, I can connect with the Virtual Machine Manager and define my VM.
On physical machine I used Disk2vhd to generate a vhdx. Moved that file to the test host and converted to qcow2. Copied disk image to /var/lib/libvert/images and added it as my drive image when I defined the VM.
VM starts but will not boot. Stupid question: Should I have installed virt-win-gt-x64.msi from the virtio-win ISO on the source Windows install before I created the vhdx?
Edit: Since I posted, I installed a Debian guest from scratch in this environment and it runs like a champ. 👍
virtio-win allow for much better performance using virtualized drivers rather than plain emulation from qemu. Virt Manager doesn’t offer windows guest paravirtualized drivers, that’s on the guest side, and virtio-win ISO helps a lot with this.