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



Hi Miles,

This util simply creates a VM and doesn't incorporate any PVM kernels into your VM.

So basically use it to only create HVMs and then if needed like I have, convert the HVM to a PVM.

I actually prefer having control over the HVM to PVM process.

Not sure if I'm using the terminology correctly but;

HVM - hardware virtual machine.
PVM - para virtual machine.

- Brian




On Feb 16, 2009, at 6:23 PM, Miles Fidelman wrote:

Brian,

Whoa... that's cool. Unfortunately, I'm not sure my target machine is going to support the VT extensions. Why the requirement?

Thanks,

Miles

Brian Krusic wrote:
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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