Let’s assume you have a physical machine running a Linux system, and you would like to convert this system into a virtual KVM/QEMU machine, keeping everything as close to the original as possible. What follows is my approach.

The first thing we need is a raw image file which mirrors the exact layout of the physical hard drive in our physical server.

In our example scenario, the physical box has one hard drive at /dev/sda with a /boot Partition on /dev/sda2 and a physical LVM volume on /dev/sda3. This LVM volume houses a volume group with two logical volumes, one of them housing the root partition /, and the other one being unused. Also, /dev/sda1 is unused. Grub is installed into the Master Boot Record.