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* ** Thanks in advance!
D.
On Fri, Apr 25, 2008 at 10:48:17PM +0200, David Hláčik 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
dd if=/dev/sda1 | gzip -c | ssh host "cat > output.gz"
Sanity check on that?
If you're not worried about security of this transfer, might be faster to use NFS or something.
Ray
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.
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.
Actually, your lucky on this one. Windows *always* loads an ide driver into the Critical Device Database unless you explicitly tell it not to with an installation answer file, or remove it after install.
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.
Yup, did the same thing recently with WinPE 2.0 and Ghost (Same internal concepts, faster then dd and ssh/cp) when moving off an ESX server into Xen 3.2.
jlc
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David Hláčik -
Joseph L. Casale -
Les Mikesell -
Ray Van Dolson