"Thanks to two concepts driving the data center
today—economy and green building—server virtualization
is a pretty hot topic in the IT world. And lots of hardware and
software vendors are offering solutions. Virtualization solutions
have several benefits: you can easily migrate the virtual machine
from one server to another, and the virtual machine can be
provisioned as the clone image for reproducible usage, for example,
during software development and testing.
"The process for achieving virtualized server consolidation
depends on your starting point:
"If you are designing your system from scratch, you will
implement virtualization from the ground up.
"If your system already exists in the physical state, you will
migrate from the physical environment to the virtual one.
"I refer to the second process as physical-to-virtual migration,
or PV2, and it's the subject of this article. Several methods,
manual and automatic, are generally available to facilitate P2V
migration. I'll talk about those methods and show you how to
convert a physical server to a virtual machine using Clonezilla
Live, a cloning-based solution.
"With Clonezilla Live, you first create a system image from the
physical server, then use the boot CD to restore the image onto the
virtual machine's hard disk. It's simple and fast, and it should be
useful for software developers, system administrators, and support
engineers who want to analyze a system copy while maintaining the
original one unchanged (and avoid possible hardware mismatch
challenges)."
