I have an old (but still in use) RH9 system I want to migrate to a
virtual machine. One of the main reasons for doing this will be
performance: a database query on an internal website which is used
regularly is taking 15s on the old hardware, where the same query on the
same database on a virtual machine takes well under a second...
The server is only used internally but all the same I want to minimise
downtime. The "normal" method I'd use would be to shut down the
hardware, take an image of the drive, restore it into a virtual machine,
boot it, fix any problems (eg driver issues) as necessary. Depending how
long that last step takes this could mean the system is offline for
quite a while.
I could create an empty VM, boot it to a live CD, and rsync the whole OS
data from the old system to the new one, but I'm not sure which rsync
options I'd need to use to make sure the user permissions copied across
correctly (I assume that since /etc/passwd will be copied across it
doesn't matter that the users don't exist initially), then make the VM's
disk bootable, and take it from there; all of that I could do with the
other system online and then fix the problems in the VM with the old
system still online, ready to re-rsync later to catch up with any
changes after shutting down all services like the database etc. But (a)
I'm not sure how to make the VM boot and (b) I'm not sure what else
would go wrong.
Any suggestions?
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