[CentOS] Migrating standalone systems to xen guests

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

On Fri, Mar 4, 2011 at 4:57 AM, Simon Matter <simon.matter at invoca.ch> wrote:
>> On Fri, Mar 04, 2011 at 10:31:18AM +0200, Jussi Hirvi wrote:
>>> Is there any (easy?) way to migrate running standalone CentOS 4 or 5
>>> systems to xen virtual stacks?
>>>
>>> Rebuilding those systems from scratch on the xen machine would take
>>> plenty of work.
>>>
>>
>> If you're talking about Xen PV domUs, then the process
>> is pretty much like this:
>>
>> - ssh into the standalone system.
>> - make sure /etc/modprobe.conf includes xenblk driver (so that it'll be
>> included in the generated initrd when you install kernel-xen).
>> - fix /etc/fstab to have xvd* (xen virtual disk) devices instead of sd*.
>> - install kernel-xen rpm.
>> - verify kernel-xen is the default in /boot/grub/grub.conf.
>> - verify root= parameter is correct in /boot/grub/grub.conf for
>> kernel-xen.
>> - copy/transfer all the files from the standalone system to virtual
>> disk/image.
>
> Make sure here to copy with preserving hardlinks, use tar or rsync -aH for
> this. And, you can exclude some content like /dev/* (but not the directory
> /dev itself!).

Use "star". This will preserve SELinux configurations, which neither
tar nor rsync do.