There are many Physical servers running in almost every organization. With the acceptance of virtualization, it become necessary to migrate existing server to VM, to save power & to efficiently utilize computing resources.
If you have ever installed Xenserver, you must have noticed following option during installation.
Convert an existing OS on this machine to VM (P2V)
Many OSs can be migrated using xenserver installation disc. When I tried to test it on my Lenovo Thinkcenter running OEL, I got err, OS is not supported. This is when I tried diff alternative. The only best option I found was to manually copy all files from physical to vm. This was done successfully & we have migrated few servers using following method.
1) Install same linux os on vm with minimum installation.
2) Boot both physical & VM using Fedora or any other Linux Live CD.
3) Mount all partition on Physical machine in appropriate hierarchy. e.g /, /home, /var
4) Mount / on VM. (considering single LVM partition on VM, Why use LVM? it will be easiest when it comes to expand existing drive.)
5) Copy all files from / of physical machine to / of VM. You can use rsync -apEogvtru
6) Reboot VM, you’ll find Linux up with minor configuration like ip address & few kudzu prompts.
