Is is possible to take a snapshot of a non virtual server (Ubuntu) and restore it in a virtual machine? I'm asking because I'd like to have an exact copy of my production server to use as a dev server. Note that I don't have physical access to the production server.
You can use something like
dd if=/dev/hda of=/tmp/path/server.img
then use QEmu'sqemu-img convert -f raw -O vmdk server.img server.vmdk
(replace vmdk with vpc and the file extension with vhd for Xen or Hyper-V)Otherwise most virtualization environments have tools to do what you want, this is just one way.