Converting Physical Servers to Virtual Servers

From MyWiki

Q:

Does anyone know of a simple way to migrate a physical Linux host to a VM easily. I know VMware has a tool that does this for Windows servers, but is there something I can do for my Debian machine? Maybe I can make a Ghost image and then convert that if someone has Norton Ghost. I am hoping someone has done this before because I loathe the idea reconfiguring a very customized server.

A1:

http://anothersysadmin.wordpress.com/2007/07/03/migrating-a-linux-machine-to-a-vmware-host/

Their method is to set up a vmware server with a rudimentary version of the old OS, reboot the physical host from a CDROM, make sure both old and new are on the net, then do a dd disk copy using netcat (nc) to the VM disk space, and then reboot the VM.

To tweak the network configs on the new VM, either do it prior to the disk copy or you can use the vmware tools afterwards.

A2:

http://liveview.sourceforge.net

From the web page: Live View is a Java-based graphical forensics tool that creates a VMware virtual machine out of a raw (dd-style) disk image or physical disk. This allows the forensic examiner to "boot up" the image or disk and gain an interactive, user-level perspective of the environment, all without modifying the underlying image or disk. Because all changes made to the disk are written to a separate file, the examiner can instantly revert all of his or her changes back to the original pristine state of the disk. The end result is that one need not create extra "throw away" copies of the disk or image to create the virtual machine.

One caveat is, for non-forensic migrations, the rollback-log feature should be turned off to prevent the log file from filling up the disk and to prevent unnecessary system load.