[CentOS] Migration from VMWare to HP Blade

Miskell, Craig Craig.Miskell at agresearch.co.nz
Wed Nov 19 19:12:23 UTC 2008


> Hi all,
>
> A few months ago, I migrated some of our internal servers to HP
> blades, as the VMWare box they were previously running on was getting
> too slow.
>
> However, it wasn't without it's problems, and eventually the only way I
> could get them to work was:
>
> Install the same version of CentOS on the blade (believed to be 5.0, but
> /etc/redhat-release says 5.2)
> Took down both servers, booting them off the SystemRescueCD,
> mounting all the partition on /mnt/transfer etc
> Ran rsync to copy all the data from one to the other - except /boot and
> /lib/modules
> Brought the blade up, and saw that it booted fine.
>
> However, a new kernel has been released and we tried rebooting... And
> it panicked. It seems to be LVM related, in that it can't mount /dev/root -
> and I've tried manually running mkinitrd to regenerate the initrd to no
> avail.
>
> I was just wondering if anyone had encountered similar problems, and
> knew of any solutions?
Having just done the opposite (test migrating a CentOS server from physical hardware to VMWare), I have a very good idea  :-)  It was CentOS 4, but the basic bits should be the same

You need to edit /etc/modprobe.conf, and change the line (or lines) that start with:
"alias scsi_hostadapter"

If the server was vmware, the existing lines are probably
alias scsi_hostadapter mptbase
alias scsi_hostadapter1 mptscsih

I'm not sure what you'll have to change mptbase and mptscsih to be; on HP servers, cciss is the correct driver.  Others will vary (you could try a quick basic manual install on the target hardware and see what gets put in that file by the OS installer).

After you've changed modprobe.conf, re-run mkinitrd and reboot.  Should be good to go.  You'll also have to watch out for HWADDR in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth*, either changing it to match your new hardware, or removing it entirely.  Kudzu will probably take care of sorting out the network card driver entries in modprobe; follow your nose and take a guess, you'll probably get it right.  Either way, mkinitrd is only necessary (in this case) to get access to your root device

Hope that helps,
Craig Miskell

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