I need to P2V a rhel5 machine to xen under rhel5. I know I can use dd if=/dev/sda then using virt-install --import on the host, but the downside of this is the original machine has 80% free space on its drive.
Does anyone know of (or can document) a quick and easy method which works reliably, to produce a bootable xen image which can run under a hvm in such cases ?
I tried clonezilla to make the image, to avoid the free space problem, but it failed to do the clone with "something went wrong" (useless info, i know).
At the moment im looking at doing a dd of each partition, and a file level copy of the partition which is mostly empty, then creating a new virtual disk, copying the partitions over to it by mounting both the new image and the virtual drive on a second vm, then copying the boot sectors over, then copying the file level backup..... there must be an easier way ?
Oh, and budget is $0. :)
Use
virt-p2vwhich is part of RHEL6 and Fedora 15.It is a commandline tool that migrates from physical to virtual.
The author of
virt-p2vhave made many other tools in the virt- series. Check out his blog for cool howtos.Seem to have found a kludge for this.
Instead of messing about with partition sizes and such, just dd the entire drive and use cp --sparse=always to make a sparse file version of the image. The dd still takes a long time, but it removes the need for vast quantities of space on the vm host, which was the original concern.