Citrix XenServer tip: Doing a physical-to-virtual conversion

In Citrix XenServer, there is a module that allows you to do physical-to-virtual conversions (P2V). This module works for supported operating systems (OSes) only, and currently supported are Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 sp2 and later. P2V techology available in XenServer is limited, but if you have a physical server running one of the supported OSes, it is useful anyway.

Why is XenServer's P2V support so limited? The installation you run on your physical machine uses its own "physical machine kernel." To use it in a Xen environment, this kernel must be replaced by a paravirtualized kernel. Because you can't just put any kernel on an operating system, the list of supported operating systems is limited. XenServer provides these kernels for supported OSes only. XenServer by itself does not support P2V for Windows servers. If you want to do that, you need one of the third-party tools that is available for this purpose.

Before you start, there are two conditions to meet, aside from the requirement that your OS is supported. First is that you must have access to the XenServer. Normally there isn't a reason to switch it off anyway, but just make sure that it is up and you can reach it.

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Basically, if you are doing P2V on 64-bit Linux, it should work fine. In case you are using 32-bit hardware or software and the P2V conversion fails, you need to take a different approach to the P2V conversion. In that case, on the very first screen you see when booting from the XenServer installation CD, press F2 for advanced options. Next, type p2v-legacy. This starts a special P2V program with support for 32 bits. The procedure below describes how to do a P2V conversion of a supported server operating system. After a succesful conversion, you will see the virtual machine listed in XenCenter.

On the XenServer installation CD, you'll find a simple tool that does the conversion for you. However, if you need to do P2V on a non-supported operating system, you'll still need external utilities, such as Platespin PowerConverter.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Sander van Vugt is an author and independent technical trainer, specializing in Linux since 1994. Vugt is also a technical consultant for high-availability (HA) clustering and performance optimization as well as an expert on SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 (SLED 10) administration.

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