I’m going to talk briefly about virtualizing live linux servers. At work i’ve just virtualized my first red hat box. Was it painless? No. Was it informative? Yes.
l was given the task of p2v’ing the box after a disk in its mirror failed. So with a good bit of googling i came upon this tutorial on how to virtualize the box. It was not quite complete for me and I had to figure out various error messages I encountered along the way but I eventually managed it and with shaking hands clicked the vm’s power on button.

I must admit I was expecting a good number of errors when it started (and would not have been surprised by a kernal panic), but it booted into kudzu hardware manager uninstalling all the old bits and installing the new and too my relief completed its boot without any further issues.

Some of the issues that I came across along the way is doing the conversion in this way creates a VM for you and it firstly mounts a VM convertor helper ISO into the VM. This helper VM requires an IP address etc so you need to either let it DHCP for an address or Statically assign one during the convetor wizard screen.

Also as it needs to be contactable on the network you need to ensure that the VM is set up so that the network card(s) are on your production network. So if any of you normally put the cards into an isolated lan then this wont work. Also I’m not sure if this is to do with our setup or convertor “feature” I found I had to have the machine running the convertor client connecting to the convertor server on the linux box in the same subnet.

Trouble is now I’ve done one I expect I’ll be labelled with the “Linux Virtualization Expert” badge at work and will be given lots of other jobs that wont be quite so smooth! Ah well its all about the learning curve isnt it.