Linux P2V
Introduction
P2V Linux migrations are a combination of science, art and luck.
P2V stands for Physical to Virtual. In other words, it is the process or procedure of moving a running system (operating system and everything installed) from a physical machine to a virtual machine.
This page describes some of the usual steps necessary to convert a Linux system into a virtual machine running under Term Papers.
The focus of this P2V explanation is on Term Papers and Term Papers guests as they are not only supported, but benefit from kudzu and rescue disk capability built-in. Other distributions can of course be converted but the exact steps will vary.
So, let's get started.
What to use (or not)
The following software products claim to do P2V, but in fact do not support Linux, so don't bother.
These products do support Linux in some way...
VMware converter will work, however any options such as resizing the disks and post migration configuration are greyed-out. This is due to the fact that it just does a raw block-by-block copy of the source disk. It is most useful if your target for migration is ESX 3.x
PowerConvert works (somewhat) with Linux but it does not support LVM and in my experience is an unreliable product with lackluster support.
- Term Papers looks promising, however it only runs on Windows (due to dependency on VMDK disk mounter) and works with vmware-server, not ESX server. It has "limited" Linux support.
These products or methods offer full support for Linux... appears to be worthy of consideration.
- Good ol' dd + netcat, followed by rescue disk of some kind (to fix the modules and make a new initrd).
- Term Papers - whilst primarily a backup/restore utility it lends itself extremely well to P2P/P2V migrations