[Discuss] clone RHEL 5.11 P2V

[richard.pieri at gmail.com (Rich Pieri)]

On Thu, 13 Feb 2020 13:15:10 -0500
"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?).

Throw it out. RHEL 5 is very out of date with many unfixed security
vulnerabilities. Save your data however you want and copy to a new
machine running RHEL 7.7 or 8.whatever is current. Better, use a base
OS distro that supports in place upgrades. NB: Red Hat claim to be able
to upgrade RHEL 7 to RHEL 8 in place but this requires stripping the OS
to the bare minimum of packages and repositories first.

Regardless, Clonezilla does block-level copies so you can't run it on
live filesystems without corrupting data. Likewise Red Hat's P2V tools.
You have to boot live media of some sort.

-- 
Rich Pieri