Self-made VMware P2V migration of Linux machines

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日本語

Self-made VMware P2V migration of Linux machines

Posted by Alessandro Perilli | Monday, March 22, 2004 | 4 Comments

Anders Ahl, a VMware NG user, published an interesting how-to for Red Hat Linux machine (from 7.0 to 9.0 families) migration from physical to virtual. Here it is:

1. Ghost the machine (at least the boot and root systems) 2. Restore it in a VM. 3. Boot on the appropriate RedHat CD (preferably an .iso of it...), using the "linux rescue" option. 4. chroot to your system (In the case of RedHat prior to version 8.0, you can use the RedHat 8 CD in most cases as older CD versions don't support this feature without some tweaking...) 5. Run kudzu to remove old devices and find the new ones. (or manually edit your /etc/modules.conf file, which is the most important since it includes your scsi-device) 6. Create a new init using mkinitrd on your kernel-version. (Example: /sbin/mkinitrd -v -f /boot/initrd-2.2.12-20.img 2.2.12-20) 7. Keep your fingers crossed and reboot your VM. 8. Re-configure your NICs after installing the VMware-tools.

Nice job Ahl! Many thanks!

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4 Comments

Anonymous Thursday, March 23, 2006 9:48:00 AM

Ciao, ma è possibile utilizzare il software vmware P2V per virualizzare una macchina fisica linux?nelle specifiche di prodotto non viene espressamente indicata questa possibilita e da alcune prove non sembra possibile.!
Ciao Grazie

mergatroid Friday, April 07, 2006 8:06:00 PM

Nice clean summarization of the steps - thanks alot!

Anonymous Monday, July 24, 2006 11:12:00 PM

This method works well.

I used partimage to image the partitions on my systems. It is an open source (and free) alternative to Ghost.

Thanks for the advice!

Anonymous Friday, August 18, 2006 2:46:00 PM

You can also use mkcdrec (mkcdrec.ota.be) for this job, understands Linux very wel, after restore 'chroot /mnt/local' (maybe you need to load a BusLogic driver, 'modprobe BusLogic')
do a 'service kudzu stop' and a 'service kudzu start' the mkinitrd trick from above and you're set.

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