VMs: creating from bare metal install?

[Henning Sprang]

Hi Mark,

On Sun, Jun 6, 2010 at 12:10 PM, Mark van Harmelen
<markvanharmelen at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have no experience of virtualisation, apart from running VirtualBox here
> and there, and I'm wondering if anyone has an easy-to-do recommendation for
> me, please.

There are many virtualization solutions and setups out there, and a
multiple of them are used by so many people that all of them must be
called a generally viable solution if one wants to use virtualization.

The final choice depends on details in your useage scenarios and
general infrastructure, as well as personal prefrences.
Such a decision should be based on a lot of facts - much more than you
wrote here - and/or a trial period to test the solution under
near-production circumstances.

So, Xen and KVM can be good solutions for you, you might also consider
OpenVZ, too.
As far as I see, if you want to use an Ubuntu Server as virtualization
host, KVM might be the best supported option of those.

> Has anyone got any experience converting a bare metal server to a virtual
> image?

There are tools saying to support that, but I'd always try to do a
re-install wherever possible - any take the chance to introduce an
automated deployment and configuration solution so you never have to
think about such a conversion again because your systems are setup
from bare metal in orders of minutes.

Henning