[fedora-virt] Re: virt-p2v

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 10:34:22AM -0800, Brian Krusic wrote:
> I've used virt-p2v many times with great success.
>
> However I have an issue.
>
> I've always converted hosts having small disks of around 35G over to  
> domUs but have an issue were my current host in need of being  
> virtualized has a physical disk of 400G but its / partition is only 35G, 
> the rest of the drive is unallocated/unpartitioned and therefore unused.
[...]
> I obviously don't want to migrate the entire 400G disk as it only has a 
> 35G root partition (ext3, no LVMs in this case).

Oh dear, this is a problem :-(

The answer unfortunately is that virt-p2v currently doesn't support
this - we can only migrate whole block devices.

Unfortunately even compression doesn't help very much here.  Even if
the disk is mainly zeroes, the gzip-based compression used doesn't
compress very well, so you'll still have a longish wait.  You can try
selecting compression anyway to see if it helps.

It's on the long to-do list to fix this so that people can migrate
partial disks (including just subdirectories, and excluding
subdirectories).

BTW, if the disk doesn't use LVM, you will need to use version 0.9.9,
uploaded to the website a few days ago, because that fixes a bug
related to having the root partition not being on LVM.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Emerging Technologies, Red Hat  http://et.redhat.com/~rjones
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