[Libguestfs] Trying to use virt-p2v

[Greg Scott]

Sigh...  Sometimes nothing goes right.  For my workaround, I used
ntbackup on the source Windows machine to make Windows savesets on the
target Windows VM.  And then the plan was to restore those savesets and
system state on top of another newly built Windows VM.  The virtual
equivalent of a Microsoft bare metal restore.  

The first try - I was using the libvirt default Realtech NIC driver on
my target VM and the backup estimate was around 20, count 'em, 20 hours
for about 230GB.  After around 9 hours, about 2AM, it failed when my
target Win2008R2 VM went offline.  

So I took the opportunity to change virtual NICs and set up my target
Win2008 VM with the Virtio driver.  And - as long as everything was down
anyway - I also added a br1 bridge to my RHEL host and 2nd Virtio NIC to
the target VM.  It's going to need a private connection for its backups
at the colo site.

Brought it up and started backing up again.  This time, running ntbackup
for only the system drive and again for the data drive, instead of a
monolithic saveset with both.  By around 3AM I couldn't hold my eyes
open anymore and went to bed.  And the backup died around 4AM when my
target VM went offline AGAIN!  This time, the only way to fix it was
disable the 2nd virtio NIC, then disable the first Virtio NIC and
re-enable it again.  And now it's back online and I started up another
ntbackup.  This time, instead of 20+ hours to backup 280 GB, it's
projecting about 5 hours to backup 158 GB.  

So the good news is, the Virtio NIC driver is definitely faster.  Bad
news is, it apparently is not stable, at least when there's a 2nd one
and doing a bulk copy.

- Greg Scott



-----Original Message-----
From: Matthew Booth [mailto:mbooth at redhat.com] 
Sent: Thursday, September 01, 2011 3:35 AM
To: Greg Scott
Cc: Richard W.M. Jones; libguestfs at redhat.com
Subject: Re: [Libguestfs] Trying to use virt-p2v

On 31/08/11 19:36, Greg Scott wrote:
> OK.  I changed the subject line so it fits in with the post I did a
few
> minutes ago to the list.
>
> I did my virt-p2v-image-builder on June 28, version virt-p2v 0.8.1
> devel.20110628025409.  You just released virt-v2v 0.8.3 and I can go
> grab that and install it on my Fedora 14 VM.  It looks like my
virt-P2v
> CD that I burned 2 months ago is still current.

Looking at git, I think this version should be ok.

Matt
-- 
Matthew Booth, RHCA, RHCSS
Red Hat Engineering, Virtualisation Team

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