[Users] Physical server to OpenVZ

[Gregor Mosheh]

Stefan Kok wrote:
> 1) Is this possible (backup physical server and restore to virtual) ?
> 2) If so is there any documentation / HOWTO's or pointers that you could
> give please ?

The basic OS would survive a tar/untar process. But there're some items 
typically missing from a VPS setting which would be vital to running on 
a physical server. The first that come to mind are module utilities 
(modprobe et al) and the modules themselves, some daemons (klogd, 
udevd), and then a few fundamental config files (fstab, lilo.conf or /boot).

I think that you probably *could* do it with a lot of effort (90% of it 
being adding new packages to the VPS after you're untarred it), but that 
if your goal is fast and reliable recovery, you'd be best off restoring 
the VPS into a VPS setting. It's not difficult or time-consuming to 
install the OpenVZ system, and they could easily have it installed by 
the time the backup drive arrived at the new office.

If the new HN already had OpenVZ, then it's trivially simple to run 
vzctl create to generate the VPS, then replace the content under 
/vz/private/X with the tar content.

-- 
Gregor Mosheh / Greg Allensworth
System Administrator, HostGIS cartographic development & hosting services
http://www.HostGIS.com/

"Remember that no one cares if you can back up,
  only if you can restore." - AMANDA