Creating guest/image from live physical machine?

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I've been searching for howto on this but all the guides/docs I've
found seem to assume that we would want to either convert from an
existing VMWare/Xen VM or install a whole new VM.

So my question is: is it possible to create an image of a running
physical machine and then start it on another machine as a VM but with
different "hardware" specs?

Specifically, I have a server running with dmraid 1. I want to
virtualize it with minimal downtime onto a machine which already is
already spec with dmraid 1. Since it doesn't make sense if to recreate
a pair of virtual disk again for dmraid on top of the physical
machine's dmraid.

At the moment, based on some of the things I've read which are not
specific to the situation, it seems that I have to do something like
the following

1. dd the physical machine drives into a file
2. Copy it to the new physical machine.
3. From within the VM guest, dd the file into the VM's virtual drive
4. Edit fstab of the VM after it's been over-written, i.e. mounting
/dev/sda instead of /dev/md0
5. Change any other necessary config
6. Reboot the VM and hope the new settings take.

Or is there a better/easier/safer way to do this?
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