Hyper-V in Server 2008 R2 has one super new feature
I put together a Windows Server 2008 R2 box over the weekend (my old Vista machine is now the server). I spent part of today working on trying to do a P2V conversion of my FreeBSD server to bring it onto the box in Hyper-V. At first, I tried using Acronis Home 2009 to clone the disk, then re-clone into the VM, like I’ve done before. For whatever reason, it did not like the RAID in the FreeBSD box, and wouldn’t read the data from it. Along the way, I decided to prep the new Hyper-V VM, and lo and behold, I discovered it’s super new feature: when creating a new virtual hard drive, you can copy an existing physical drive (not “file system”, the entire drive!) as the contents of the virtual drive. This means that you can take the disk out of the old system, hook it up to the new system, clone it into the VM really quick, and be on your merry way. The only real drawbacks are that you cannot do a dynamically expanding disk like this, so the new VHD is the same size as the physical disk it was clone from (although it will be fast), and that it takes forever because it does a sector-by-sector copy of the disk. While this is still not a proper substitute for a true P2V agent-based conversion, this is pretty darned close, especially for OS’s that are not mainstream enough to justify someone writing the conversion agent.
J.Ja
Great news
I can’t wait to try it. I have been wanting to dive back into FreeBSD for some time, now I have a platform that will help me out.
@nucrash
Unfortunately, it looks like the x64 FreeBSD 7.X will *not* run properly under Hyper-V. 8.0 will (just hit RC1 a few weeks ago) from what I hear, as will x32. This isn’t so bad (do you really need x64 for anything you’d do in a VM anyways, in most non-server cases?), but in my case, since I am trying to do a P2V of an existing server, I am essentially SOL. I just dropped the drive back into the original server box & fired it back up.
Looks like I will indeed be doing a full migration off of FreeBSD; I’d rather not keep 2 servers up and idling, the FreeBSD server really isn’t doing much of anything (it serves a file via FTP once a month, does some basic Web hosting, handles email chores, and does a touch of CGI handling), and I am in the process of building some .NET Web apps, so between the two servers, it is going to be the FreeBSD one that is least useful now.
J.Ja
@Justin James
If you haven’t already done so, you might try booting into knoppix.iso on the source/target, then use “dd” to copy source (dd if=) to an output file with a decent blocksize over an ssh connection. Example:
#ssh desthost.domain.com “dd if=/dev/sda” | dd of=/dev/sda bs=16M conv=notrunc,noerror
@Dietrich Schmitz
Yeah, I’ve used dd before to do disk dumps, but in this case, it is less effort to just hook the drive up and let Hyper-V copy the contents. Unfortunately, the compatability issues between Hyper-V and FreeBSD seem to be at the kernel level from what people report. When 8.0 gets a full release, I’ll upgrade to that, and retry the operation. I don’t want to let go of the BSD server “for good”, it’s an OS that’s treated me well, I’d rather not deal with Exchange for my email, and such… but at the same time, it can’t be my main Web server any more due to my goals with development. I do still want it around, though, because I’d love to give some other development environments a shot, and *Nix is the way to go with them.
J.Ja