Migrating Windows VMs from Proxmox BIOS/KVM to FreeBSD UEFI/Bhyve

Another excellent guide from friend of the website Stefano Marinelli.

A client of mine has several Windows Server VMs, which I had not migrated to FreeBSD/bhyve until a few weeks ago. These VMs were originally installed with the traditional BIOS boot mode, not UEFI, on Proxmox. Fortunately, their virtual disks are on ZFS, which allowed me to test and achieve the final result in just a few steps.

This is because Windows VMs (server or otherwise) often installed on KVM (Proxmox, etc.), especially older ones, are non-UEFI, using the traditional BIOS boot mode. bhyve doesn’t support this setup, but Windows allows changing the boot mode, and I could perform the migration directly on the target FreeBSD server.
↫ Stefano Marinelli

I link to guides like these because finding such detailed guides born out of experience, written by actual humans with actual experience – instead of bots on content farms – is remarkably hard. There’s more than enough similar content like this out there covering Windows or popular Linux distributions like Red Hat, but the BSDs tend to fall a bit short here. As such, promoting people writing such content is something I’ll happily do.

Marinelli also happens to host the Matrix server (as part of his BSD Cafe effort) that houses the OSNews Matrix room, accessible by becoming an OSNews Patreon.