Question How do I emulate specific hardware when running a VM?

[olafec]

I have a W2003 R2 server that needs to be taken off the networks, but we have vital software and configs that will only run on our instance of 2003R2.

A thought was to emulate the hardware in VM on a modern PC - install software, and copy the files to the VM. We've looked at a bunch of VM software, but dont see anywhere (or on the net) that we can emulate specific processors/memory/Mobos.

Could someone shed some light on what is and what is not possible? Thanks!

 

[kanewolf]

VMs are intentionally hardware agnostic. License key values are usually related to MAC addresses. You should be able to override MAC addresses for your VMs. Is your software tied to a processor ID rather than a MAC address That is the only situation where the underlying hardware should matter.

Here is an article on how to spoof CPUIDs in VMWare for example -- http://vknowledge.net/2014/04/17/how-to-fake-a-vms-guest-os-cpuid/

You will have to figure out what specific hardware your licenses are tied to then see if there is an article on spoofing that value.

 

[olafec]

Thanks for the reply - the program is also tied to the GPU and memory as well.. its research software, so im not surprised. I was just under the impression that any piece of hardware could be "installed" in a WM with the right settings. Thanks!

 

[kanewolf]

Thanks for the reply - the program is also tied to the GPU and memory as well.. its research software, so im not surprised. I was just under the impression that any piece of hardware could be "installed" in a WM with the right settings. Thanks!

GPUs and VMs are tricky. You may want to just move the GPU to the new host and then assign it to a VM. Memory is an easily configurable resource for VMs.