On 11/03/2017 06:09 AM, hw wrote: > Sorin Srbu wrote: >> Hello all, >> >> This week I've tested out a few ways to do a P2V on a rather ancient CentOS >> 6 server, in order to move it to a Hyper-V host. >> >> So far my tests have failed rather spectacularly. >> Initially I was set on doing a simple dd-routine, but was told that the >> server cannot be taken off-line as it's being used daily, so had to look for >> other solutions. >> >> The disk setup is currently as follows: >> >> Three 500 GB sata-disks, sda, sdb and sdc, are used to build a software raid >> called md0. No LVM's here. >> >> Sdd is a 120 GB drive, with partitions for boot, swap, home and /. >> No LVM's here either. >> >> The farthest I've gotten is with the Rear solution. >> http://relax-and-recover.org/ >> >> The backup goes well, but recovery for some reason fails to create initramfs >> with all the installed kernels, as well as failing with an error saying it >> cannot find /boot/grub, after which the recovery terminates. >> >> Virtualizing systems like this is kinda' new to me, having it done on >> Windows only, and I'm not really sure >> how to proceed when it's a CentOS system in question. >> >> The physical CentOS-server runs a few license managers and nfs-shares that >> server molecular modeling software, that are rather intricately set up (I >> inherited this server some fifteen years ago). >> >> Are there any easier ways to do a P2V at all? >> > > I think I would try to create a VM that has the physical disks passed through > and also has access to whatever storage it´s supposed to reside on once the > conversion to a VM is completed. Then copy it from the physical disks to that > storage. > > Converting without shutting the machine down is probably not possible. How would you recover if that server were suddenly destroyed, let's say by a power supply failure that fried the motherboard and all the disks? If you can't bring up a machine on new, bare iron starting with nothing but your backups and a CD or USB stick with a recovery tool, you need to seriously reconsider your backup strategy. -- Bob Nichols "NOSPAM" is really part of my email address. Do NOT delete it.