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Accepted
gunwin
Asked: 2012-06-25 12:57:19 +0800 CST

Create an image of a CentOS system

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I provide a server (and site) to a client via Rackspace Cloud Hosting, and my client wants to now host the entire thing within his own account.

Since it's not possible to just transfer the ownership, I need to somehow create an image of the machine via SSH which I can then use on a new server.

Is this possible, and does anyone know of a way of doing this.

Note

I am talking about virtualised machines here, but I only have access to the virtualised partition and not the system as a whole.

ssh centos6

3 Answers

  1. You should be able to use the snapshot facility to produce the image, and then issue a request to rackspace to re-assign the snapshot to another account.

    I would advise you query this within a ticket first.

    Failing that you could spin an image using the same OS (CentOS6 based on you tag) and use rsync to copy files across the servicenet connection as it does not incur band width charges.

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  2. Best Answer

    See https://serverfault.com/a/367844/113375

    This will work perfectly for you ...

    On the source VM instance ...

    sudo su
cd /
tar cvpzf backup.tgz --exclude=/proc --exclude=/lost+found --exclude=/backup.tgz --exclude=/mnt --exclude=/sys /

    On the target machine (dedicated or VPS)

    tar xvpfz backup.tgz -C /

    And make sure any dirs excluded are re-created

    mkdir proc
mkdir lost+found
mkdir mnt
mkdir sys
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  3. Uhhh... The best is to ask support first or just rise ticket and open chat so they might help. If not, as I know this myself, you would need to write yourself a script, which would transfer the image between two cloud files accounts, and you would need to use a cloud files api for this. Snapshots are saves in cloud files. This would help: http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/content/cloud-files-uploading-large-files

    You can use pay as you go temp server the way that you download the image to it first (so it's bigger), then upload with segmenting to another cloud files account.

    But, this is very likely not to work for security reasons. I read once that you cant copy image in the same datacentre, but form UK to US that would work.

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