Centos – Migrating production CentOS server to a VirtualBox VM

centosmigrationvirtual-machines

I want to migrate a production server to a VM for development purposes, and exactly duplicate the production environment as closely as possible.

The production server is running CentOS with a single ~3TB partition on a RAID 5 array. Although only 13 GB is used, partimage is not an option because the machine hosting the VM has a 150 GB drive and partimage requires images be restored to a partition of equal or greater size.

Right now it looks like the best option is to setup a new CentOS VM from scratch, using production config files as a reference, and copying over all the relevant data.

Is there an easier option?

Best Answer

You can convert your physical machine to virtual using VMware converter. The resulting vmdk file can then be used directly by VirtualBox.

In VirtualBox during the Create New Virtual Machine process, when you get to the Virtual Hard Disk dialogue select Use existing hard disk and then browse to the location of your vmdk file.

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