[et-mgmt-tools] Re: 32 and 64 bit redhat to Xen conversions

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Thu, Mar 27, 2008 at 07:12:33AM -0400, John_D'Esposito/OVServices at techout.com wrote:
> I was wondering if you can help me with a few questions.

Sorry for the late reply - I was on holiday yesterday.  Please send &
CC questions to et-mgmt-tools list so that others can share from the
answers (and also answer your questions when I'm on holiday :-)

http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/et-mgmt-tools

> Does your implementation handle both 32 and 64 bit Red Hat installations?

Yes.  The live CD itself happens to be an i386 (32-bit) ISO, but that
is just so that it can be booted on both i386 & x86-64 processors.
The actual P2V migration is pretty much independent of architecture,
so you can use this single disk image on all 32 and 64 bit (x86-based)
systems.

> If I don't have a backup of a source Red Hat server, how risky is this 
> process?

It's pretty robust at the moment.  The rule is that the CD does not
make any changes to the source system at all.  HOWEVER, mistakes are
always possible, hence the advice to keep a backup.

In reality the worst it is likely to do is to corrupt your /etc/fstab
file, and there will be a backup in /etc/fstab.p2vsaved.  In the
future we'll be doing more modifications during the migration,
eg. installing new kernels, kernel drivers, resizing partitions, and
at that point the opportunity for failure becomes more drastic.

> Does the destination server need to be an active XenServer?
> Can/does your implementation create the virtual image on the
> destination server?  Can the destination server be any server
> accessible through ssh that has disk space?

No, the destination does not need to be a Xen server.  Yes, you can
transfer to any staging server reachable by ssh.

Currently if you do this you'll get slightly reduced functionality --
you may need to make some edits to the config file by hand because we
rely on contacting the Xen server to find out how it is configured
(eg. is it 32 or 64 bit -- the configuration file is different under
these circumstances).  In future if we can contact the final server we
will be able to do things like automatically bringing up the virtual
server, but we will always have a fallback mode for people like
yourself who want to use a staging server.

Note that you can also transfer to non-Xen hypervisors like Linux KVM.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Emerging Technologies, Red Hat  http://et.redhat.com/~rjones
virt-p2v converts physical machines to virtual machines.  Boot with a
live CD or over the network (PXE) and turn machines into Xen guests.
http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-p2v