[Discuss] clone RHEL 5.11 P2V

[greg at freephile.com (Greg Rundlett (freephile))]

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