Xen users - Apr 2010 - Best way to go from Physical to Virtual with Fedora 11 on Centos 5.4 Dom0

I am about to be moving 2 of our production servers over to be virtualized on
our CentOS 5.4 Xen machine. I know usually I would want to do a "dd"
deal to move the physical host over but on one machine I need to reduce the disk
space and the other I need to increase. Since "dd" is a bit for bit
copy it would use the same physical size of the current disks. I know I could do
a resize2fs on it, but wouldn''t it be better to just start with the
right size? What would you use in this event? rsync or similar?

-- 
 
Donny B.

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I would suggest the following: 


    1. Mount the original filesystem 
    2. run df -h to see what''s the actual usage of said filesystem 


At this point I create two copies of the original filesystem, one
"portable" tar.bz2 and a "fixed" LVM volume.


For the portable image: 

    1. create an empty file (dd if=/dev/zero of=live_copy.img bs=1M count= 2048
for a 2Gb filesystem, for example)
    2. create a filesystem on that file (mkfs.ext3 live_copy.img for an ext3 FS)
    3. mount it (mount live_copy.img /mnt/copy -o loop) 
    4. rsync between the two (rsync -avz ) 
    5. umount the image, compress and safely store it. 

live_copy.img is a proper filesystem, with permissions, symlinks and whatnot.
You can use it as a source for another install, for example.


For the LVM volume: create it , mount it, format it and rsync between the
original filesystem (just like the image). This LVM is to be used as a block
device for your DomU


Hope it helps. 


De: "Donny Brooks" <dbrooks@mdah.state.ms.us> 
Para: xen-users@lists.xensource.com 
Enviados: Martes, 20 de Abril 2010 17:00:48 
Asunto: [Xen-users] Best way to go from Physical to Virtual with Fedora 11 on
Centos 5.4 Dom0

I am about to be moving 2 of our production servers over to be virtualized on
our CentOS 5.4 Xen machine. I know usually I would want to do a "dd"
deal to move the physical host over but on one machine I need to reduce the disk
space and the other I need to increase. Since "dd" is a bit for bit
copy it would use the same physical size of the current disks. I know I could do
a resize2fs on it, but wouldn''t it be better to just start with the
right size? What would you use in this event? rsync or similar?

-- 

Donny B. 

_______________________________________________ 
Xen-users mailing list 
Xen-users@lists.xensource.com 
http://lists.xensource.com/xen-users 


_______________________________________________
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Xen-users@lists.xensource.com
http://lists.xensource.com/xen-users