Xen users - Feb 2006 - Converting a standalone system into a Xen guest?

I''ve got a couple of old, but working, SuSE 7 machines which
 I''d like to transfer to Xen guests.

  What would be the best way of going about this?

  The most obvious approach I can think of is to create a large
 disk file and do the eqivilent of:

    dd if=/dev/hda of=- | netcat | dd if=- of=/home/xen/host.img

  Is that liable to work?  Or would I be better doing something
 else?  (Like making a filesystem in a file, or LVM partition, then
 using rsync to sync?  The problem I see here is that I''d have to
 exclude /dev, and the new guest would be missing entries there).

  I realise that once I''ve done the initial syncs, however that is
 done, I will need to make sure I have the xen kernel rather than
 whatever kernel I currently have upon the systems.  But otherwise
 I''m assuming a literal copy of some kind will work correctly.

-- 
Steve
-- 
http://www.steve.org.uk/

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On Tue, Feb 07, 2006 at 04:39:13PM +0000, Steve Kemp wrote:
:
:  I''ve got a couple of old, but working, SuSE 7 machines which
: I''d like to transfer to Xen guests.
:
:  What would be the best way of going about this?

I''m sort of stumbling along myself but what I did (and worked with my
debian host conversion) was just to use tar.  I created a tar file and
scp''ed it to the Xen system as I was using it as a template system for
multiple guests.  If you create and mount the filesystem on your Dom0:

tar cf - / | netcat | tar xf - 

should do it.

I wasn''t able to present a whole disk (/dev/sda) to the guest only
partitions (/dev/sda1), though I really didn''t try hard, so I
don''t
know if it''s meant to work or not.

The kernel will be booted from your Dom0 filesystem so you don''t need
that in your DomU, though if you need modules those will need to be in
your DomU.

-jon

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