Virtualizing Live Linux Server to ESX 3.x Host

1 comment September 5th, 2007

There are many ways to virtualize a linux O.S. This video tutorial will show you how to do a live pull of running Linux O.S. to ESX host.
NOTE: Ideally, you should power off your linux server and boot up with Knoppix. However, since this is a single purpose MySQL server, we don’t need the data to be consistent. We can rsync the difference later.
This tutorial requires common knowledge of unix/linux commands and O.S.
Let us begin..

In this example, I needed to virtualize a linux mysql server to VmWare ESX platform. Here is a roadmap we will follow…

1) Use disk dump (dd) to get the data of the drives, fastest method…

2) Create partition data vmdk file

3) Convert you images to VMFS3 format

4) Create a VM with similar configuration and point the drives

5) Boot with Knoppix and rebuild initrd for scsi support (if needed)
6) Use kudzu to detect and reconfigure new hardware

7) Rsync changed data

8) Change IP and test…

Details coming soon….