Quick Emulator ( qemu ) for Hardware Virtualization

Have you ever met a requirement where you had to install a windows on top of linux ? Here is a cool solution. QEMU is a free and open-source hosted hypervisor that performs hardware virtualization. Lets see how to install a windows server on a Ubuntu server.

This tutorial assumes that your hardware supports virtualization.
You can check by running following command on your linux terminal.
egrep -c '(vmx|svm)' /proc/cpuinfo

If output is 0 , then not supported , any value above 0 means it is supported.

1. Install qemu
apt-get install qemu-kvm

Once QEMU has been installed, it should be ready to run a guest OS from a disk image.

Now we will test with a tiny example.Download a small image of linux from here.
This is a Small Linux disk image containing a 2.6.20 Linux kernel, X11 and various utilities to test QEMU.

Now unzip archive
bzip2 -d linux-0.2.img.bz2
Note, that this command will not preserve original archive file.
To preserve the original archive, add the -k option:
bzip2 -dk linux-0.2.img.bz2
Now the image is ready.

you can issue the following command.
sudo qemu-system-x86_64 -display vnc=0.0.0.0:1 -smp cpus=2 -m 250M -machine pc-1.0,accel=kvm -net user,hostfwd=tcp::80-:80,hostfwd=tcp::3389-:3389 -net nic linux-0.2.img

This command creates a virtualization with 2 cpu , 250MB memory with VNC server running on it.
You can connect through any vnc client ( realvnc or tightvnc ) 0.0.0.0:1

Now to install a windows OS , we first need to create an empty image

sudo qemu-img create -f raw win.img 40G

This creates an image with 40GB hardisk and raw format.
Now we can install windows os by using the iso image like below.

sudo qemu-system-x86_64 -display vnc=0.0.0.0:1 -cdrom /media/windows_server_2012_r2_with_update_x64_dvd_6052708.iso -smp cpus=2 -m 16G -machine pc-1.0,accel=kvm /var/spool/win.img

Once you run the above command , a vnc server is started and you can connect from a vnc client on display 1 or 5901, depending on client and install the windows.

Enable IIS.
Enable RDP.
Shutdown VM.
Run Windows VM with IIS via:

sudo qemu-system-x86_64 -display vnc=0.0.0.0:1 -smp cpus=2 -m 16G -machine pc-1.0,accel=kvm -net user,hostfwd=tcp::80-:80,hostfwd=tcp::3389-:3389 -net nic /var/spool/win.img

This will launch the machine with 16GB ram , 40G Hardisk . You can connect from RDP and work on it.