VMs: creating from bare metal install?

[Aaron C. de Bruyn]

On 2010-06-06 at 11:10:42 +0100, Mark van Harmelen wrote:
> Hi everyone
> 
> 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.

You might want to take a look at Proxmox VE (http://proxmox.com/).
It's essentially Debian with a few customized packages.
It boots to a shell (no GUI), and then you actually manage it through
a web interface.

It lets you create KVM, and OpenVZ virtual machines.

Pretty slick.

> 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

The easiest way I've found is to boot the server using something like the
System Rescue CD and then running:
dd if=/dev/sda | ssh root at ip.of.hos.t dd of=/path/to/vm/image.raw

If you are using proxmox, it would be something like:
dd if=/dev/sda | ssh root at ip.of.hos.t dd of=/var/lib/vz/images/101/vm-101-disk-1.raw


Shoot me an e-mail if you run into trouble.

-A