[CentOS] CentOS 6 P2V alternatives?

[hw]

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.  Passing
the disks through may give you the advantage that the downtime can be kept to
a minimum.