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Boot Windows VM on cluster

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jdeananderson edited this page Mar 4, 2025 · 1 revision

Installation Guide

Previous installation step: Create a windows VM Image

Next installation step: Build and test Guacamole

Boot Windows VM on cluster

  • Copy your newly created Windows VM to cluster storage. For now, this can be anywhere for testing; home space, group space, apps, etc.
  • Make a working copy of the new Windows VM to play with on the cluster. This copy is just in case something gets corrupted so you don't have to start over installing Windows again. Make sure to shut down the read-write VM gracefully if at all possible. Killing the process of a read-write VM can cause the OS to have issues at next boot.
  • In the 7lbd_getting_started directory of the downloaded code, edit the vm_test.sh script. The purpose of this step is just to verify that your Windows VM will boot successfully on your cluster. It may take some tweaking to get it to work. Realize that the noVNC connection here is not encrypted. This is a quick, temporary situation just to verify that the VM is booting. There are two options here for connecting to the VNC console of the Windows VM, either using Open OnDemand's noVNC client, or vncviewer run on the cluster node.

Next, update the code in vm_test.sh with your relevant information:

To use noVNC, update the following with your Open OnDemand server to use the OOD reverse proxy to access your VNC console:

ONDEMAND_SERVER="https://ondemand.rc.byu.edu"

Update the following paths in vm_test.sh:

  • QEMU_EXEC: Path to the qemu-kvm binary
  • OVMF_FIRMWARE: Path to the UEFI boot code
  • DISK_IMAGE: Path to the qemu disk image to boot
  • MACHINE_TYPE: Type of VM hardware. Must be recent enough to support Windows 11.
# Set environment variables for VM paths and parameters
QEMU_EXEC="/usr/libexec/qemu-kvm"
OVMF_FIRMWARE="/usr/share/edk2/ovmf/OVMF_CODE.fd"
DISK_IMAGE="/home/ja56/win11/win11test_no_msoffice.qcow2"
MACHINE_TYPE="pc-q35-rhel9.4.0"

Once vm_test.sh has been updated with your information, run vm_test.sh. If everything is working correctly, this script should:

  • Run the Windows VM using qemu-kvm
  • Start websockify and provide a URL to access the VNC console of the VM If everything is running correctly, connect either through a web browswer via the OOD reverse proxy, or use vncviewer to 127.0.0.1:1. The output of the vm_test.sh script will give the addresses to connect to for both methods.
  • All we are looking for here is that you have graphical access to the VNC console of the VM you copied over.

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