Just wanted to share some success I had moving some Xen guests from
one server to another.
Problem Recap
We had Xen host on a single core 32-bit CentOS 5.4 installation on an
AMD Athlon 2.1 GhZ system that was giving hard drive errors and needed
to move the LVM-backed Xen images to another server. The replacement
server was a quad-core AMD Phenom system running 64-bit CentOS 5.4.
Our original plan was to use LVM snapshots so that we wouldn't need a
maintenance window. This worked fine in test, but we decided to bring
down the Xen guests after all. After shutting down the systems we
backed up the LVMs.
To show the backing LV:
lvdisplay /dev/rootvg/xm_c32_001
>From this, we grabbed the "Current LE" field and LV Size. We used LV
Size to create a temporary mount point. We used the "Current LE"
parameter to create an identically sized LV on the replacement server
.
On the failing server:
dd if=/dev/rootvg/xm_c32_001 of=/mnt/backup/xm_c32_001.out
We gzip'ed the resulting .out file and saved it as a backup.
+++Footnote
BTW, there are many recommendations to do the following on the virtual machine:
dd if=/dev/zero bs=1024 count=xxxx of=/partition.out
rm partition.out
By creating the large empty file on each partition *in the guest
istance* (/var, /, /home, etc.), it will improve the image
compression. Space was not much of a concern and we were worried
about blowing out a production system, so we opted not to do this.
+++Footnote
Once the backing LVM was created, we created the LV on the replacement server:
lvcreate -l xxx -n xm_c32_001 rootvg
Then used dd to recreate the file:
dd if=xm_c32_001.out of=/dev/rootvg/xm_c32_001
Next, we copied the /etc/xen/xm_c32_001 configuration file to the
replacement server. We generated a new UUID using the "uuidgen"
utility. We also created a new MAC address. Finally, we started the
instance:
xm create xm_c32_001
Everything came up, but no network. From the root console we logged
in then edited the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0. Xen had
apparently renamed the script and put in a DHCP configuration. We just
renamed the backup file and commented out the MAC address line and
restarted networking, *and* ifdown eth0 then ifup eth0.
It took a few seconds for the network to properly discover the new MAC
address. Once that was done, everything worked beautifully.
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