Physical to Virtual Server on a Budget

Weeks back, I had assembled a fairly impressive server for hosting virtual machines.  It's intended purpose was to consolidate a number of aging servers.  Today, I will be describing my physical machine to virtual machine adventures.

The Machines

I have created numerous virtual machines from scratch.  I have even converted a fair share of Windows boxes to virtual machines with varying success.  I knew this project was interesting as these were the servers I needed to move:

• A Windows XP "server" handling some proprietary data collection applications
• A Debian 3 server running web applications and serving hold music
• Another Debian 3 server acting as a mail server among many other odd maintenance scripts
• A FreeBSD 6 server hosting web applications

The Migration

First, I backed up all data on each box.  When dealing with old hardware that has uptime over 700 days, there's often a surprise when you give it a reboot.

I prepared a VM for the XP box using VMWare Converter which took a number of hours to complete.  Luckily this machine only has one MS Access DB that it stores so it was just a simple task of moving that database once the virtual machine was running.  It should also be noted that most Windows migrations like this are required to re-activate as the hardware changes significantly.

Having never done a Linux or FreeBSD physical to virtual (P2V) conversion, I read a number of sites with various suggestions.  It was suggested I simply clone the box and perform a rescue on it once fired up within the VM.  I initially chose Clonezilla to image the first Linux box.  One suggestion I would make is eyeball your hardware before attempting to clone it.  The first time I booted Clonezilla I didn't realize the server I was converting only had a quad-speed drive in it.  The boot took 15 minutes.  I yanked a 52x from a dead PC and rebooted again in under 3 minutes. 

The image creation seemed to go without a hitch.  I created an empty VM in VMWare server, mounted the ISO and attempted to restore the image.  Clonezilla performed half the restoration and then asked for another file that did not exist.  This seemed to be a common issue with this product so I scrapped it and gave g4l a shot.  It just kept getting worse as g4l would only backup a GB of data and then drop back to the menu screen.

In desperation, I grabbed and Acronis True Image Home boot CD and attempted a backup that way.  It created an image without complaining.  I booted off the same CD in VMWare, recovered the image and was able to boot into my Linux install.  Flawless.  Both Linux servers cloned using this method worked without a hitch.

The FreeBSD box did not fare nearly as well.  While backing up the server unreadable sector errors continued to show up.  I told Acronis to ignore these sectors however the restored image still would not boot.  The BSD box itself did reboot so that was left in production.  It is running simple LAMP applications so they can easily be migrated into a more familiar Linux VM.