Xen users - Aug 2008 - Migration of physical host to Xen-Instance

Hi,

we are currently in the process of virtualizing an already existing 
infrastructure. So far we are able to run a XEN-System and several DomUs 
and everything is fine.

Now we like to migrate an already existing Linux-System (actually 
CentOS) which is installed on its own box to our XEN-System, i.e. we 
want to virtualize it.

Are there any documents about best practices of how to move this system 
to the XEN-Box?

Glad for any hints and suggestions.

Cheers,
Tino


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Hi Tino,

I''m interested in exactly the same thing. I was wondering if migration
of an existing server might be possible using an LVM snapshot and careful
matching of the disk and nic device names in the Xen config file.

Rob

-----Original Message-----
From: xen-users-bounces@lists.xensource.com
[mailto:xen-users-bounces@lists.xensource.com] On Behalf Of Tino Schöllhorn
Sent: 13 August 2008 14:58
To: xen-users@lists.xensource.com
Subject: [Xen-users] Migration of physical host to Xen-Instance

Hi,

we are currently in the process of virtualizing an already existing 
infrastructure. So far we are able to run a XEN-System and several DomUs 
and everything is fine.

Now we like to migrate an already existing Linux-System (actually 
CentOS) which is installed on its own box to our XEN-System, i.e. we 
want to virtualize it.

Are there any documents about best practices of how to move this system 
to the XEN-Box?

Glad for any hints and suggestions.

Cheers,
Tino


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> From: xen-users-bounces@lists.xensource.com
[mailto:xen-users-bounces@lists.xensource.com] On Behalf Of Tino Schöllhorn
> we are currently in the process of virtualizing an already existing
> infrastructure. So far we are able to run a XEN-System and several DomUs
> and everything is fine.
>
> Now we like to migrate an already existing Linux-System (actually
> CentOS) which is installed on its own box to our XEN-System, i.e. we
> want to virtualize it.
>
> Are there any documents about best practices of how to move this system
> to the XEN-Box?
>
> Glad for any hints and suggestions.
>
The basic idea is to get the file system of the physical "to be
virtualized" box into a guest image.

There are quite a few different ways to store the guest image (a file,
partition, logical volume, network storage, etc.).

The things to watch out for are things like /etc/fstab, the partition
labels etc. and using the right root=option on the kernel command line
(in Grub),
Also watch out for network specific settings in the "to be converted"
guest file system.

The process isn''t too bad once you watch out for those types of things.

As far as I know there is not a lot of documents online that describe
probably since it is relatively straight forward and will differ
depending on your
exact situation.

If you are looking for a book on Xen, I would recommend the one that
we wrote called "Running Xen". The website may even have some links
that could
help you.

If you give more details of how you want to store your guests and how
much information you will need in terms of the linux commands needed
to back
things up etc. I am sure that you could get quite a bit of help from
this list to get you through the process.

On Wed, Aug 13, 2008 at 10:18 AM, Robert Dunkley <Robert@saq.co.uk> wrote:
> I''m interested in exactly the same thing. I was wondering if
migration of an existing server might be possible using an LVM snapshot and
careful matching of the disk and nic device names in the Xen config
I think this method should work well as long as you get a full backup
of the file system when doing the snapshot. Alternatively, simply
doing a dd into a file worked for me awhile back as well.

Hope that helps.

Cheers,
Todd

-- 
Todd Deshane
http://todddeshane.net
check out our book: http://runningxen.com

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Tino Schöllhorn wrote:
> Hi,
>
> we are currently in the process of virtualizing an already existing 
> infrastructure. So far we are able to run a XEN-System and several 
> DomUs and everything is fine.
>
> Now we like to migrate an already existing Linux-System (actually 
> CentOS) which is installed on its own box to our XEN-System, i.e. we 
> want to virtualize it.
>
> Are there any documents about best practices of how to move this 
> system to the XEN-Box?
If you are ready to do some experiments, please try 
http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-p2v/

--Sadique
>
> Glad for any hints and suggestions.
>
> Cheers,
> Tino
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Xen-users mailing list
> Xen-users@lists.xensource.com
> http://lists.xensource.com/xen-users
>

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