i-am.ws

VirtualBox P2V

Clearing out an old computer in the basement, I wanted to save the system on it. The box was running RedHat and a Content Management System "CMS Made Simple" that I had used to build some websites. Of course this asks for P2V, in other words copy the content of the disk in the server to a virtual image that can then be run on a hypervisor, in my case VirtualBox.

I thought that this would be a tough thing to do, but it ended up being pretty simple. To start, take out the disk, fit it in an external disk enclosure and contact that by USB to the system with VirtualBox. Use "fdisk -l" to find the device name. You don't care about the partitions on the drive, because you want to copy the whole thing.

Now copy the content of the disk to a file with a command like "dd if=/dev/sda of=~/RH-CMS.img". Next convert it to a VirtualBox compatible image with "cat ~/RH-CMS.img | VBoxManage convertfromraw stdin ~/.VirtualBox/HardDisks/RH-CMS.vdi 4327464960". The last number is the size of the image as given by "fdisk -l /dev/sda". Again it is not the size of the partition(s) but the size of the device.

If you (also) run VMware, convert this VDI file to a VMware VMDK format with "VBoxManage clonehd ~/RH-CMS.vdi ~/RH-CMS.vmdk --format VMDK".

Final step is to create the VM. Start VirtualBox, create a new VM and when it asks for "Virtual Hard Disk", click "Existing" and select the RH-CMS.vdi file you just created. And that's all there is to it. You can now increase your disk space, snapshot the image, create backups and your server can continue life without taking up a physical box in the basement.

Posted at 01:48PM Mar 15, 2014 by WWWillem in Virtual  |