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
Hi, thanks for answer, now i know it will work, btw. does it works good in xen for your after moving from esx? Did you feel like performace is same, or ESX was faster? And then at last ... what you have done with PCI unknown hardware driver on windows when running on xen? :)
Thanks in advance, this was really great information ,now i feel that my concept was right!
D.
On Fri, Apr 25, 2008 at 11:33 PM, Joseph L. Casale < jcasale@activenetwerx.com> wrote:
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 _______________________________________________ CentOS-virt mailing list CentOS-virt@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos-virt
Hi, thanks for answer, now i know it will work, btw. does it works good in xen for your after moving from esx? Did you feel like performace is same, or ESX was faster? And then at last ... what you have done with PCI unknown hardware driver on windows when running on xen? :)
Thanks in advance, this was really great information ,now i feel that my concept was right!
I am probably going to invoke a series of emotional based responses with mine, but IMHO vmware is an incredibly enterprisable product, very polished, very robust and it works just plain good. It's also been around a long time. Xen is a new product, and at that you are using their opensource version. If you want everything working perfectly, get the marketed version, otherwise you are using software that is in development. Don't let that comment give you the idea Xen isn't good, its awesome but you get what you pay for, and vmware is expensive for example.
As far as how it worked, its not as fast as there are no stable pv drivers yet. Its slower, but it works.
The unknown device is well, unknown, and it simply remains that way:)
Good luck! jlc
Joseph L. Casale wrote on Fri, 25 Apr 2008 18:11:58 -0600:
As far as how it worked, its not as fast as there are no stable pv drivers yet. Its slower, but it works.
Just my experience. I ran an old Suse as hvm in Xen and moved over to VMWare Server on Win2k3 for it. Performance on VMWare/Windows was much better. The machines are almost the same spec. On the other hand performance of centos5 PV guests in Xen is very good and better then in VMWare.
Kai
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David Hláčik -
Joseph L. Casale -
Kai Schaetzl