[Discuss] clone RHEL 5.11 P2V

[Greg Rundlett (freephile)]

Here's a detailed walk through of the whole process for RedHat. [1] It
looks like rebooting the target machine is inevitable.

[1]
https://www.redhat.com/files/summit/session-assets/2018/S1359-Moving-your-physical-Red-Hat-Enterprise-Linux-servers-to-Azure-or-AWS-Distribution.pdf

Greg Rundlett
https://eQuality-Tech.com
https://freephile.org


On Thu, Feb 13, 2020 at 1:15 PM Greg Rundlett (freephile) <
greg at freephile.com> wrote:

> I have an old server running RHEL 5.11 at a remote location that I can SSH
> to via a jump host.  I want to clone this machine and migrate it to the
> cloud, aka Physical to Virtual or P2V, before it is turned off and
> mothballed.  It has NFS mounted shares that are 15TB and 3TB which I do not
> want to clone due to the size.  My preferred cloud vendor is Digital Ocean.
>
> What's the best way to do this? Remotely.  I would like to use FOSS (XEN,
> KVM?).
>
> RedHat offers "Converting physical machines to KVM virtual machines using
> virt-p2v in RHEL7 and RHEL 8" [1] However, you need to reboot the physical
> machine into a special image - and like I said, I'm trying to do this
> remotely if possible.
>
> I was looking at using Clonezilla [2], but it doesn't implement live
> cloning, and I'm not sure how I would clone it 'offline' when I am remote
> to the source machine. Is it possible to install Clonezilla onto the
> machine in it's own partition, reboot and unmount the regular OS partition,
> then clone?
>
> I didn't want to use VMWare because I thought I'd have to pay (possibly a
> lot of money) -- but I found that they offer a "free to use" conversion
> tool (vmWare vCenter Converter Standalone [3] that does online (hot) P2V
> conversions of RHEL 5   So now I'm considering this as a first option. The
> drawback here seems to be that I need to run ESXi [4] on the host machine
> (which rules out Digital Ocean). But I can get a server for $100/mo [5]
> Then I found that they must use PasswordAuthentication [6] so that is a
> blocker because I can only access the target machine using a jump host (SSH
> gateway).
>
>
> [1] https://access.redhat.com/articles/2702281 (login required)
> [2] https://clonezilla.org/
> [3]
> https://my.vmware.com/en/web/vmware/info/slug/infrastructure_operations_management/vmware_vcenter_converter_standalone/6_2_0
> [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VMware_ESXi
> [5] https://www.cybercon.com/dedicated-vmware-server/
> [6]
> https://www.nakivo.com/blog/vmware-p2v-linux-conversion-comprehensive-walkthrough/
>
> Greg Rundlett
> https://eQuality-Tech.com
> https://freephile.org
>