Results tagged “vmware” from madness.at

Over the last few weeks, I've been exploring ways to convert physical Debian Linux boxes into virtual machines. VMWare has a tool for doing P2V conversions, however, as far as I can tell, it only supports Windows physical machines. Not good. Any alternatives? Uhmm, how about Mondo Rescue?

Mondo Rescue is a disaster recovery software developed by Hugo Rabson for GNU/Linux. It allows one to effortlessly backup and interactively restore Linux systems. And what is most interestingly, it allows you to backup to a variety of media like CD-R, DVD and NFS shares.

So with Mondo Rescue, a Debian Etch box with two IDE disks (/dev/hda, /dev/hdc), Linux software raid (/dev/md0) and VMWare the process eventually goes like this:

• install Mondo Rescue onto the system you want to convert
  
• stop all problematic services (eg. databases, ...)
• make sure the following linux kernel modules are loaded

mptspi mptscsih mptbase scsi_transport_spi scsi_mod sd_mod pcnet32

• run "mondoarchive" and let it create a set of ISO images
  
• boot the new VM with the first ISO image
• at the bootprompt, type "interactive" to get started
• since the device names have changed, mondo will complain about fstab, fix it (eg. repartition /dev/sda)
• continue restoring all data
• intitialize boot loader, set boot device to /dev/sda
• edit grub.conf, update the line starting with "#kopt=root=...", set the boot device to /dev/sda1; also remove kernel options for serial console redirections
• when mondo finishes, DO NOT REBOOT!
• remount your disks (eg. mount /dev/sda1 /mnt, mount /dev/sda2 /mnt/usr and so on)
• chroot into /mnt
• edit /etc/mtab, fix the devices names to match the new installation
• edit /boot/grub/devices.map (eg. echo "(hd0) /dev/sda" > /boot/grub/devices.map)
• create a device node for sda (eg. mknod /dev/sda b 8 0)
• run update-grub and also grub-install hd0
  
• delete /etc/udev/rules.d/z25_persistent-net rule
  
• exit, umount & reboot