How to get a Xen PV VM to boot in Hyper-V?

[techcat]

Hi,

this is slightly off-topic, but I thought I might find someone here who has faced the same problem.

We use Veeam Agent for Linux (server edition) to backup a Ubuntu 16.04 Linux VM (cloud-hosted, so I have no access to the hypervisor itself). The backup goes into a local Veeam B&R repository.

The technology used by the cloud provider is Xen and they use a paravirtualized kernel by default. However, it's possible to switch over to a so-called "distribution" kernel, which can be any x86_x64 Linux kernel. That way, it's also possible to compile modules such as veeamsnap to be able to use Veeam Agent for Linux.

To boot this custom kernel, PvGrub is used. However PvGrub won't be helpful if the VM is supposed to run on a fully-featured hypervisor such as Hyper-V.

What I'd like to do is to boot a backed-up copy of this VM on one of our local Hyper-V hosts. I googled for a while, but I still don't have an exact idea on how to make this work (most of the manuals assume you have access to the hypervisor itself and can use special conversion tools). I think this is what the process might (roughly) look like:

* Take snapshot of VM using cloud provider control panel
* Install regular bootloader (grub2) inside VM
* Run Veeam backup to local repo
* Revert to snapshot taken before so VM will still be able to boot on Xen next time it's restarted

Has someone done something like this and would be able to give me a few hints?

Thanks,
Jan

[PTide]

Hi,

Maybe I got it wrong, but why wouldn't you take backup to the local site, restore from it, boot from liveCD and install grub just as you planned?

Please also note, that VAL supports only fully-virtualized VMs.


Thanks

[techcat]

Hi PTide,

thanks for your feedback and thanks for your hint regarding Veeam's support policy. I think VAL is still the best solution for now.

I'll try to get GRUB installed with a live CD.

Cheers,
Jan