[CentOS-virt] How do I do Centos 7 p2v migration?

Thu Aug 21 01:41:53 UTC 2014
Nico Kadel-Garcia <nkadel at gmail.com>

On Wed, Aug 20, 2014 at 9:54 AM,  <me at tdiehl.org> wrote:
> On Tue, 19 Aug 2014, Gilberto Nunes wrote:
>
>> Hi
>>
>> I do this last week, and I use CloneZilla to generate a file image from a
>> phisical server running Ubuntu and after that, used Clonezilla to restore
>> into KVM hypervisor with no tears...
>
> Thanks for the info. I was kinda hoping for a solution using tools that are
> supplied with Centos but this sounds feasible so I will give it a try.

One of my favorite approaches, which is *FAST*, is to take the live
server down and make tarballs of all its relevant filesystems with a
live CD, and possibly an NFS share. Store the tarballs for reference,
and use a live CD or PXE toolkit to allow access to the disk images in
the new virtual machine.

Then create partitions as needed, mount them, untar the contents onto
the partitions, and edit the mounted /etc/fstab. Also do a "grub
install" inside the chroot cage, and unless your underlying
virtualization.

Reboot from the new disk image, and voila. Working virtual
environment. It can take tuning to automate or optimize it, to install
virtualization toolkits or best configure the network, but I've
installed roughly..... 18,000 systems this way, for both
virtualization and hardware operating systems. The tarballs allow
excellent source control of the underlying system, and easy tuning of
the base OS image: just untar them and do a 'chroot' into them, and do
manual editing or yum install or whatever. Exit the chroot, and tar
them back up, and deploy with the new image.

This is generally *MUCH, MUCH* faster than replicating disk images or
doing a pre-configured kickstart installation.