Re: [Xen-users] imaging an existing system?

[Brian Krusic <brian@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

Well, a slightly less elegant solution but one I've done several times  
is to boot the machine you want to turn into a VM using this CD;
http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-p2v/

But the caveat is that you must first have a Xen dom0 on a machine  
supporting Intel VT or AMD V extensions.  That machine must have SSH  
open as well.
Summary of what happens;

1 - Boot the p2v CD.
2 - Answer several self guided questions.
3 - An image of the entire disk is created over the net via SSH on  
your VT/V enabled dom0.
The down side is that the domU image file is the same size as the  
entire source disk.  What I've done since is to create a new HVM domU  
where not all the image is allocated (a sparse file) and then kpartx/ 
lomount/mount the original HVM and new HVM and then dump | restore  
from the original HVM to the new HVM.
This may seem a little Polish to some of you, but hey, I am 1/4 Polak :)

- Brian




On Feb 16, 2009, at 2:15 PM, Thomas Halinka wrote:

> Hi Miles,
>
> Am Montag, den 16.02.2009, 16:47 -0500 schrieb Miles Fidelman:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I have an old server, running Debian Sarge.  I'm getting ready to
> > migrate to a new machine - more horsepower, newer version of  
> > Debian, etc.
> Good plan ;-)
>
> > As an interim step to migrating all of my production stuff, it sure
> > would be nice to generate a snapshot of the current system, turn it  
> > into
> > an image file, and get it running on the new box, as a VM.
> >
> > Any suggestions as to procedures and tools for imaging an existing  
> > system?
> First boot up your old-system into rescue-mode (use knoppix, grml,
> whatever) to get a consitent system....
>
>
> Steps in dom0:
> #################
>
> create an empty image file on dom0
>
>   dd if=/dev/zero of=/path/to/images/sarge-disk bs=1M count=5000
>
> ---> creates a 5GB-Disk
>
> Format it
>
>   mkfs.ext3 /path/to/images/sarge-disk
>
>
> Mount it
>
>   mount -o loop /path/to/images/sarge-disk /mnt
>
>
> Copy your data into it
>
>   rsync -avzH --numeric-ids -e ssh root@old-system:/* /mnt/
>
> umount && create domu.cfg
>
>   umount /mnt && cd /etc/xen && cp $extisting-domu.cfg sarge.cfg
>   vim sarge.cfg
>
>
> > Thanks much,
> >
> > Miles Fidelman
>
> hth,
>
> Thomas
>
>
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