Running dual boot windows inside of bhyve

[Alan Somers]

On Mon, Dec 25, 2017 at 5:12 PM, Aryeh Friedman <aryeh.friedman at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Cross posted to virtualization@, hackers@ and questions.
>
> I have a dual boot machine (windows 7 64 bit and fbsd 11.1-RELEASE [amd64])
> and want to run the windows partition as a vm in bhyve how would I go about
> this.   Bonus if the process is standalone scriptable so I can add it as a
> feature of PetiteCloud.
>
>
I fear that you may be out of luck.  Windows deliberately frustrates this
use case by profiling its hardware at installation time and at every boot
thereafter.  If the hardware changes too much, then Windows demands a new
license fee.  Moving from physical hardware to a VM would probably trip
every one of its alarms.  For this reason, I would recommend using a
separate instance for your VM.  However, if you do use a shared instance,
then make sure that your PC is booting in UEFI mode.  BHyve can only  boot
Windows in that mode.  If you do that, then BHyve will probably be able to
boot it just fine.

-Alan