[Cialug] making VM images faster

[Dave Hala Jr]

Linux Servers, mostly rhel3, centos 4 and centos 5


On Sun, 2010-03-28 at 09:40 -0500, Jonathan C. Bailey wrote:
> Dave-
> 
> Take a look at XenConvert 2. Despite its name, it can convert to a few different formats from a running machine. It does the conversion on the existing server then generates a set of files you can copy. It has worked fairly well from my experience..
> 
> BTW, you didn't mention... Are the servers you're converting Linux or Windows?
> 
> 
> -Jon
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Dave Hala Jr" <dave at 58ghz.net>
> To: "Cialug" <cialug at cialug.org>
> Sent: Sunday, March 28, 2010 8:50:07 AM GMT -06:00 US/Canada Central
> Subject: [Cialug] making VM images faster
> 
> I've been converting some existing servers to VirtualBox VM's by
> rebooting them into single user mode, mounting an external usb hard
> drive and dd'ing the image onto that USB drive.  After I have the dd
> image, I'm converting it over to a .vdi file.  The process takes
> forever. 4-5 hours for a dd image, 4-5 hours to convert, 45 minutes to
> copy the .vdi file onto the host machine.
> 
> The bottlenecks appear to be the usb drive and the size of the dd
> images. I'm considering just opening the case and connecting a hard
> drive to the server's controller.  Anyone come up with a simpler faster
> way?
> 
> 
> :) Dave
> 
> 
> 
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