[CentOS] dd trough scp with tar

[Les Mikesell]

David Hlác(ik wrote:
> Hi,
>  
> first i will explain my experiment :
>  
> We have ESX server running virtual machines .We want to migrate to XEN. 
> As i did not found any tool for transfering ESX to for example real 
> server, or better to XEN --> please correct me if i am wrong , i found 
> following approach :
>  
> i will inside virtual machine on ESX boot from Live-CD of CentOS , using 
> dd i will transfer images trought scp to CentOs machine with xen. I 
> believe this one should work, machines on ESX are Windows2003 Servers.
> So what i need to find is how to write a command which will transfer 
> image trought scp , but for faster transfer also compress  it before 
> using tar, or gzip.
>  
> *so my input will be dd if=/dev/sda1 , my output will be gzipped or 
> tarred image on second side. sda1.img.gz*
> ** 

First, I'd expect some problems with the device drivers when you try to 
restore a vmware image onto a xen virtual environment - unless they 
present similar virtual hardware.

However, for the actual copy operation, I'd recommend clonezilla-live 
(http://www.clonezilla.org/clonezilla-live/). Boot its iso image into a 
menu system that will let you mount the image storage space via nfs, 
samba, or ssh-fs, then tell it to save the whole disk.  The advantage 
over dd is that it knows enough about ntfs and most linux file systems 
to just save the used blocks and when you restore it will let you pick 
from the list of images you've saved.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com