VMs: creating from bare metal install?

[Serge van Ginderachter]

On 6 June 2010 12:10, Mark van Harmelen <markvanharmelen at gmail.com> wrote:

> Has anyone got any experience converting a bare metal server to a virtual
> image? For some free target, maybe KVM or one of the Xen products. Xen is
> run by one of our friend-companies, so there is a slight preference for
> that. We are interested in minimising any potential virtualisation
> overheads, so the less interventionist the virtualisation technology, the
> better. But if method A is quick and easy to do and is only somewhat slower
> than method B, we'd in the first instance go method A (time is tight right
> now).


You basically just need to give you VM Host access to a container which has
the disk image(s) of your original server, and tell your vm system to boot
that image, possibly with a specific kernel in case of Xen.

Make an image of your offline server with dd, and output that to an LVM
volume on your vm host. Once you got that image, you might need to tweak
something to provide a specific kernel, depending on your chosen vm
techology, and maybe tweak fstab if you have different partitions next to /
in your vm guest. Consider paravirtualisation with Xen.

If Ubuntu is your server of choice, KVM will be your best option. If you
prefer Xen, go with Debian Lenny, or CentOS 5.5.

If performance is key, IMHO you need to go with Xen (or avoid doing
virtualisisation, obviously :-) ), especially when it comes to disk
performance.
KVM on the other hand is more easy to set up and to manage.


HTH,


-- 
    Met cordiale groet,

    Serge van Ginderachter
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