[CentOS] Migrating standalone systems to KVM

Tue Apr 5 15:28:18 UTC 2011
Ljubomir Ljubojevic <office at plnet.rs>

Jussi Hirvi wrote:
>> On Thu, 2011-03-31 at 05:41 -0700, Benjamin Franz wrote:
>>>>  I haven't tried it, but in theory you could take a clonezilla image of
>>>>  the physical machine and restore it to a KVM disk image: Just create the
>>>>  initial virtual drives at least as large as the originals, boot
>>>>  clonezilla in the VM and restore from the images.
>> That's an excellent idea! I didn't consider it when I was trying to
>> figure out how to migrate a physical CentOS 5 server to a KVM.
> 
> On 1.4.2011 4.38, Kanwar Ranbir Sandhu wrote:
>> I will try this just for shits and giggles.
> 
> Please let us know what you will find out.
> 
> - Jussi

I converted several bare-metal Windows systems to VirtualBox. KVM should 
be the same. I would clone C: partition to image file, create VirtualBox 
  virt system with same partition size and create virtual shares 
whereimage file is located.
Then I would clone from image to partition of virtual system and then 
reset Windows IDE drivers (Hiren's Boot CD and some BartPE can do it.)

Doing this on Linux would entail dd or other cloning procedure and 
LiveCD or Installation media to be able to change hdd/partition device 
paths/names (if necessary) and you are done.

Ljubomir