Convert physical drive to virtual drive

[NodeBytes]

Here's the situation, I have a physical drive that contains about 200 gigs of data that I need to convert to a virtual drive to mount on either a kvm or openvz machine. How would you go about doing this? I really need to keep the downtime to a minimum.

Thanks ahead of time.

 

[wlanboy]

dd your hard drive to an image file:


dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/var/lib/libvirt/hdd/serverdisk.img

Mount in into your vps. Done.

 

[Sonwebhost]

Buy a vps with 250gigs and have the hosting company do it for you.  Hope this helps

 

[mikho]

Depends on virtualization. For vmware I would use vmware converter

 

[herbyscrub]

Buy a vps with 250gigs and have the hosting company do it for you.  Hope this helps

SO HELPFUL.  Thanks.

I'm going to try wlanboy's suggestion for random things now.  Seems so simple lol.

 

[acd]

Why not pass physical disk directly to the kvm and call it good? Why does it need to be converted at all?
 
Assuming libvirt, add a block to your vm's container XML (or use virt-manager, or whatever you use to add this block for you)


    <disk type='block' device='disk'>
      <driver name='qemu' type='raw' cache='none' io='native'/>
      <source dev='/dev/disk'/>
      <target dev='vdb' bus='virtio'/>
      <alias name='virtio-disk1'/>
      <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x07' function='0x0'/>
    </disk>
If you're passing raw arguments to KVM, it'd look like so:


-drive file=/dev/disk,if=none,id=drive-virtio-disk1,format=raw,cache=none,aio=native -device virtio-blk-pci,scsi=off,bus=pci.0,addr=0x7,drive=drive-virtio-disk1,id=virtio-disk1
Same with OVZ, mount /dev/disk /somewhere/in/ovz/container/prebind/root

Change /dev/disk to the appropriate device file.

 

[NodeBytes]

@acd - I couldn't do that because I was moving data from a physical server to a new virtual server. I'm moving a lot of my physical servers to virtual servers.

 

[acd]

Makes sense to me.

In that case, an openvz image is basically a tarball of the root directory without /boot or /lib/modules.

Making one is pretty much as simple as 


cd /mounted/disk/path ; tar zcpSf /openvz-img.tar.gz --numeric-owner -X .
Worst case scenario, you rsync the data from the existing server to your virtual one.