Hi.
I’m searching for the way to convert a PM to VM both a linux one and a windows one.
Up to now I have only found this information, but is from 2011 so it may be outdated
Could you give me some piece of advice about it?
best regards
Hi
You should (after building a Xen machine) create the domains and disk partitions on the Xen domain and copy data over, fix fstab entries for linux, have no idea if it would work the same way for windows. Other option is create a linux host, extra SATA controller and use passthrough on the existing disk(s). Are these systems on separate disks, what booting method?
Probably quicker to just build new machines and transfer over data.
P2V should be a painless experience, the more work you do, the more chances you can make an error.
IMO it’s incredible that Citrix would deprecate XenConvert without a replacement, you’d think a P2V tool would be a primary way to gain market share.
In any case, it looks like you have options…
The official Citrix stance is to look for Reddit threads announcing downloads and discussions (!!).
The following looks like a good Citrix forum thread that describes options and some resources which may or may not still exist. They should generally work. That’s the good thing about virtualization, you can try a number of different methods until you find something that will work, and discard the rest with no risk(just don’t damage your source).
One of the main ways that people have been successful is to P2V to a different virtualization technology like VMware or Hyper-V(those technologies know how to market their products) and then use an official converter from that other virtualization to Xen.
https://discussions.citrix.com/topic/385385-where-can-i-find-xenconvert/
It also looks like Clonezilla is trumpeting itself as a way to P2V any virtualization technology
https://clonezilla.org/lecture-materials/016_Linux_Tag_2014_workshop/workshop/P2V-by-Clonezilla.pdf
Good Luck,
Whatever you do and both the two methods I described sound like they should work, report bacck on your experience… It’ll be interesting to others.
TSU
Well, I have tried the “clonezilla” approach although not with clonezilla.
I use to clone systems using system rescue cd. I was cloning a laptop with windows7. I did the image booting the laptop with system rescue in a pendrive, the I mount a remote filesystem anywhere using sshfs (may use a usb disk too but with sshfs and a disk server I have no need to use it) and I clone the partition using fsarchiver and the mbr and partition table using dd, then I copy the mbr, partition table and partition to the other lapto… so I did the same with xen. I create a new xen vm, I put the system rescue CD iso as boot CD… and the rest of the process was as if I was cloning the laptop. And it worked fine. Indeed the cloned laptop has a dual boot Windows7/ubuntu, and I’m going to clone the ubuntu partition too, with the grub dual boot. I’m sure it will work without problem, if any problem I will report here.
The creation of the vm and all the work was done from another opensuse machine with the virtual machine manager connecting to the xen server.
The vm I created was a full virt machine, I will try paravirt and test if there is any difference.
By the way. Is there any virtual machine manager client for ms-windows able to connect to the xen server?
best regards
All you describe sounds like it should work, it’s just a lot more work than most should be willing or need to do.
There are a number of cloning apps that should dup an entire disk instead of what you describe partition by partition.
If the disk sizes are different, cloning typically will automatically fill the entire target disk. If you want to allocate the partition sizes differently, then many partitioners including YaST should be able to re-size after the cloning is done.
You should be able to mount your resulting target disk either fully or paravirtualized. That’s not something that has anything to do with a disk’s contents.
As for your last question, I assume you’re asking about managing your xen machines from a remote Windows machine. I haven’t looked at this before but know that that Xen can install on Windows (or at least it did the last time I looked), and I assume that the Xen management tools running on a Windows machine should be able to manage Xen machines remotely on any OS.
TSU