On Wed, Sep 17, 2014 at 8:37 AM, me@tdiehl.org wrote:

On Wed, 20 Aug 2014, Gilberto Nunes wrote:

Do you get it??

...

Yes, I got it working. Turned out it was much simpler than I was making it. I did not need clonezilla or anything else except rsync.

What I did was a minimal install of the same os the original machine was running, and then rsync the original machine over top of the new VM, excluding things like fstab, inittab, and other things that are specific to the hardware.

+1 I've done this exact process myself, but neglected to mention it to you.

Can't beat installing off a local mirror and then rsyncing a few small differences (or much less compared the entire install) between the two machines! ;-)

This allows me to keep the original machine on line until just before I am ready to kill it off. When I am ready to kill off the old machine and start the new one I stop all externally accessible services, change the network config to reflect the way I want it in production, do 1 last rsync, reboot and I am live.

Typical down time has been less than 15 minutes.

It takes a little tinkering to figure out the stuff that should be excluded but once I got that it went well.

That's the fun of it, eh?