Migration of servers to Proxmox VE

Introduction

You can migrate existing servers to Proxmox VE.

Physical server to Proxmox VE (KVM)

There are free tools (like VMware Converter) available to migrate a hysical host to VMware. So the first step is to migrate the physical server to a VMware image. The second step is to follow the howto "VMware to Proxmox VE (KVM)". Another option to migrate a Windows machine is to use the tool SelfImage. This way you don't have to struggle with VMware Converter and VMware, so it should be easier and faster.

Physical (running) server to Proxmox VE (KVM) using SelfImage

Prepare the Windows operating system

Install SelfImage on the physical Windows machine. Execute the mergeide.reg (see Microsoft KB article for details) to provide support for the natively supported IDE controllers in Windows.

Prepare the Proxmox VE VM

Create an new KVM container with a suitable disk size. It is recommended that you choose the size 1 GB bigger than the size of the physical disk that you want to migrate to make sure all your data fits to the virtual disk.

Use VNC or SSH to connect to console on the Proxmox VE host. Export the qcow2 disk in the container directory with NBD

qemu-nbd -t /var/lib/vz/images/xxx/vm-xxx-disk.qcow2

where xxx is the VM ID.

Do the migration

Start SelfImage on the physical machine, choose to image entire hard disk, not partition. On ouput file select NBD with your PVE host IP and port 1024 as parameters. Click Start.

When imaging is complete press CTRL+C on the PVE console to stop the export of your virtual disk file.

Start the virtual machine and have fun.

VMware to Proxmox VE (KVM)

This howto describes the migration of a Windows 2003 Server (or Windows XP) from VMware to Proxmox VE (KVM).

Prepare the Windows operating system

Before you begin make a copy of the VMware image.

Remove VMware tools

Start the Windows virtual machine on VMware and remove the VMware tools via the Windows control panel. Reboot.

Enable IDE in the registry

• Start the Windows virtual machine on VMware and execute the mergeide.reg (see Microsoft KB article for details). Now the registry is changed that your Windows can boot from IDE, necessary for KVM.
• Shutdown Windows.

Prepare the disk file

My disk file used for this howto: win2003.vmdk

• Change your VMDK disk file with vmware-vdiskmanager.exe to a single growable file (vmware-vdiskmanager.exe is located in your VMware installation path, e.g. "C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Server") - open a cmd and go to the directory where your vmdk disk files are.

"C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Server\vmware-vdiskmanager" -r win2003.vmdk -t 0 win2003-pve.vmdk

• Create a new KVM VM on Proxmox VE web interface and - do not start - take a look on the VMID (e.g. 102)
• Copy the win2003-pve.vmdk to your Proxmox VE server into the following dir: /var/lib/vz/images/VMID (I used WinSCP as I worked on a Windows desktop)
• Change the win2003-pve.vmdk file to qemu format:

qemu-img convert -f vmdk win2003-pve.vmdk -O qcow2 win2003-pve.qcow2

Adapt the new KVM Virtual Machine

• Go to the hardware tab on the web interface and remove the default harddisk file
• Add the migrated harddisk as IDE for windows (only IDE works for windows) or SCSI for Linux
• Start the new Virtual Machine via the management interface
• First boot takes some time as some drives has to be loaded
• Do not forget to install Paravirtualized_Network_Drivers_for_Windows
• Finished!

For comments or problems please post to the Proxmox VE forum or to the mailing list

XEN to Proxmox VE (KVM)

XEN also uses qemu disk format, so it should work in the same manner as described under "VMware to Proxmox VE (KVM)".

Move OpenVZ containers to Proxmox VE

You can move existing OpenVZ containers (container=VE=VPS) with vzmigrate or vzdump:

• Use vzmigrate offline migration to move your container to Proxmox VE
• Use vzdump to restore from a backup

After you moved your container you need to add the following line to the corresponding config file (see /etc/vz/conf/xyz.conf):

nano /etc/vz/conf/xyz.conf

Add/edit the following line:

ORIGIN_SAMPLE="pve.auto"

Now you can manage resource settings on the Proxmox VE management interface.

Physical server (or XEN or VMware or other) to Proxmox VE OpenVZ Container

External links:

• How To Convert Physical Systems And Xen VMs Into OpenVZ Containers
• Physical_to_container