[CentOS] CentOS 6 P2V alternatives?

[Robert Nichols]

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.