[BozemanLUG] Creating a VM of a Fedora box

Brian Vincent bvincent at moonlightbasin.com
Mon Jun 14 08:36:53 MDT 2010


By the way, I thought I'd follow up on this just to be complete.

On Monday morning after I sent this message asking about how to do a p2v
conversion of a server onto a VMWare ESXi box, I found out one of the
other guys had changed the ESXi root password.  So... after that it was
a simple matter of running VMWare Converter on the physical server and
it moved it right over to the ESXi server.  It was a super smooth
process and the VM booted right up after we shut the physical server
off.  The only thing we had to do was generate a new self-signed SSL
cert.

-----------------------------
Brian Vincent
Moonlight Basin Technology
bvincent at moonlightbasin.com

-----Original Message-----
From: Brian Vincent 
Sent: Friday, May 28, 2010 8:08 PM
To: Bozeman Linux Users Group
Subject: RE: [BozemanLUG] Creating a VM of a Fedora box


Yeah, that was actually similar to something I was thinking of doing.  

What I'm really trying to avoid doing is migrating our software to a
newer platform.  This was an old personal box I took to work years ago.
One day we needed a Linux box and it was there.  So, we threw a piece of
software called OCS on that we use for automated asset tracking.  It's
been about three years and we've done a fair amount of customization to
it.  It'd be a real pain to try to migrate, though some day we'll
probably have to do it.  So yes, CentOS would definitely have been
better in the beginning, but we never expected to be using it three
years later.  Stupid Linux, it just sits in the corner and works so well
we don't ever have to invest time in it.

Oh, and I just realized it's actually fc7..

-------------
Brian Vincent
Moonlight Basin Technology
bvincent at moonlightbasin.com



-----Original Message-----
From: discuss-bounces at bozemanlug.org on behalf of Scott Dowdle
Sent: Fri 5/28/2010 7:43 PM
To: Bozeman Linux Users Group
Subject: Re: [BozemanLUG] Creating a VM of a Fedora box
 
Brian,

----- Original Message -----
> Creating a VM of a Fedora box
> 
> We've got a physical server running Fedora (core 9? can't remember)
> and we want to convert it into a VM to run on a VMWare ESXi 4.0
> server. Normally we just load up VMWare Converter, convert, and import
> but that's not working so well on this box. Now, this is the first
> time I've used VMWare Converter 4.0 so there's some differences there.
> 
> First off, running vmware-converter-client, it says to make an image
> of a physical machine you have to connect to the machine as if it were
> remote. Ok.. I can specify the "remote" machine ok under Step 1:
> Specify Source, and if I choose to "View Source Details" it properly
> sees the physical machine. The in Step 2: Specify Destination it only
> allows for a Destination Type: of VMWare Infrastructure virtual
> machine, which is not what I think I want - I need to be able specify
> a file.
> 
> How does everyone else get their physical Linux servers onto ESXi?

I didn't know that VMware's converter tool could be used on Linux
physical machines.  I haven't really looked for any P2V tools.  I don't
have an easy answer for you but this is what I used in my labs for P2P
before I found a good disk imaging tool:

1) Do a minimal install on the target machine (in your case a VM)

2) Do an rsync of the source machine on top of the target machine.  You
can selectively exclude files that you know will break the destination
(like /etc/fstab, network config files, grub.conf, and maybe the /boot
dir)

3) If you didn't break the boot setup it should just work.  If so, then
you can boot from the install media in rescue mode and hopefully fix the
boot process.

That might be a sloppy way to do it, but it should work.

Given your specifics, I'd say make a new VM and migrate the data and
service configs.  Why?  Because Fedora 9 is ancient now and EOLed some
time ago.  I don't recommend Fedora for anything other than desktops or
development... and not servers given its rapid devel cycle and short
support cycle.  For servers I prefer either RHEL or CentOS.  They are a
lot like Fedora (Fedora is actually their upstream) but supported for
much, much longer.  I'm guessing you already knew that.

Last time I was looking for Linux P2V tools was a couple of years ago
and I didn't find anything worth a darn.  I wonder what is available
now.

Red Hat Summit has a nice talk on V2V migration tools scheduled.  That
should be pretty interesting... and I'm guessing a lot of the principles
should also apply to P2V and V2P.

TYL,
-- 
Scott Dowdle
704 Church Street
Belgrade, MT 59714
(406)388-0827 [home]
(406)994-3931 [work]
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