Rick Barnes wrote:
Scott Moseman wrote:
Is there a formal, or preferred, method for importing a physical
CentOS machine into a VMware instance? I know they make
software to move Windows machines, but I couldn't find one to
handle our CentOS servers. I have done something via scp/sftp
in the past, which *seemed* to work, but if there's a better way
I'm more than interested in hearing the process.
What has worked for me is to use a liveCD to boot the image and then use
ssh and tar to clone the machine to the virtual drives. You can find
people suggesting netcat to do it but the ssh /tar method works because
just about every liveCD has ssh and tar. Just mount the drive on the
virt server say /mnt/newroot/, and if you separate images from
from the image run:
# ssh remote.box.com tar c / | tar x -C /mnt/newroot
Adjust the tar attributes as needed.
This will have the same issues as moving to a different physical
machine, but if you ever have to deal with backup/resores it is a good
idea to understand them. First, you need to make sure the filesystems
you create are compatible with the target OS version. For example, if
you mke2fs with the default options from a Centos4/5 boot/rescue CD,
then copy over a centos 3 machine, it won't work - and the same for LVM
versions if you use them. Then after the copy, you may have to adjust
the /etc/fstab and /boot/grub/grub.conf copies to reflect new partition
names or add filesystem labels to match the old names, and install grub.
If the disk controller or VMware emulation is not the same as the old
system (and not IDE) you have to build a new initrd image, too.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
_______________________________________________
CentOS mailing list
CentOS@xxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
