[Cialug] VirtualBox P2V

[Zachary Kotlarek]

On Jul 31, 2014, at 1:26 PM, L. V. Lammert <lvl at omnitec.net> wrote:

> Looked at doing a P2V on a Windows box many years ago, but VMWare
> Convertor just would not run on the HW so I rebuilt the machine.
> 
> VM Convertor just was NRFPT back then, .. now it's a commercial product.
> Is there a reliable way to do it, hopefully without modifying the original
> machine [so it can be reused if the convert fails]?


My favorite P2V tool is `dd`.

Typically that’s sufficient to make a image that can either be used directly as a “raw” image or converted with an offline tool. Occasionally you get something like hardware-keyed encryption or a hard-coded hardware path, but if you would expect to be able to replace the motherboard and have it boot you can expect `dd` to create a working VM image.

If your VM has paravirt or other drivers you can install those before imaging (they just won’t load when running on the physical machine), but typically you can also boot in a hardware emulation mode and install them after the VM is running, if you want to avoid changing the original install.

Be aware that duplicating a machine (with any tool) will confuse things like AD controllers that expect to do stateful synchronization on a per-host basis; the copy and conversion isn’t a problem itself, but the old machine will soon fall out-of-sync with server and need to be manually re-synced if you want to switch back.

	Zach

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