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Copying a Running Physical Server to Virtual Box

rated 0 times [ 3] [ 0] / answers: 1 / hits: 4978 / 1 Year ago, thu, april 27, 2023, 7:44:06

I have a server running Ubuntu 10.04. As I want to test some maintenance work, such as upgrading to 12.04, I thought I should create a VM copy of the server using Virtual Box. I don't have a physical access to the server, so I considered the following options: I do

dd'ing the entire hard disk to a raw image on my pc and then creating a VDI out of the raw dd image.

Installing the same ubuntu version, install update and mount the VDI locally and rsync the filesystem from the server to the mounted VDI creating a logical copy of the server.

The rsync solution is a bit more complicated, but seems to save bandwidth, and allows me to create a "copy" of the server with slightly different configuration (e.g. smaller disk).

What do you think is the best way to do so? One of the above methods? A different one?

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sator

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3 Years ago

answered 1 Year ago pheter · Accepted Answer

Using rsync directly turned out to be more problematic than I first thought:

The command needs to be run as root on the remote machine.

I didn't won't to enable remote root login.

The filesystem in based on LVM and it was a hassle to mount the actual root partition of the VM from inside the LVM in the VDI file.

For these reasons I ended up with a 2 step process:

Copy all the files from the remote machine to the local host machine.

Copy the files to the guest.

I finally went with basic tar, although I could have used rdiffdir provided by duplicity to save some bandwidth.

I started out by setting up an SSH tunnel which I could use to tunnel the tar files so I wouldn't have to write the archive to the filesystem I was copying.

local$ ssh user@remote -R 3000:localhost:3000

loacl$ nc -l 3000 > filesystem.tar.gz

remote$ sudo tar -vcz / --exclude={/dev,/proc,/sys,/tmp} | nc localhost 3000

This created a tar archive of the entire filesystem in my local host machine. The next step was to untar it on the guest:

guest$ cd /

guest$ nc -l 3000 | sudo tar -xvz

local$ nc guest_ip 3000 < filesystem.tar.gz

In my case /etc/fstab referenced filesystems by their UUIDs, so I had to update it with the output of guest$ sudo blkid. I also had to update the networking settings in /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules (interface names) and /etc/network/interfaces (ip addresses).