Topic: Moving to a virtual machine.

[Troels]

Hi Guys,

Yesterday i tried moving an old SME Server 6.0.1 to a virtual machine, that was no success. When the system boots is hangs at "LI". I have tried to fix the problem by changing the lilo.conf but that doesent work. The way that i did this was to boot up a gentoo live cd inside the vm, and then chroot to the sme system, so that i was able to execute the lilo program. When i do this i get the error: Fatal cannot find device /dev/sda. I tried to check mtab and i says:

/dev/ida/c0d0p3 / ext3 rw,usrquota,grpquota 0 0
none /proc proc rw 0 0

I think this wrong because the partition is now on /dev/sda3.

Has anyone had sucess moving one of these servers, maby there is a guide out there somewhere that i might have overlooked ).

[cactus]

Hi Guys,

Yesterday i tried moving an old SME Server 6.0.1 to a virtual machine, that was no success. When the system boots is hangs at "LI". I have tried to fix the problem by changing the lilo.conf but that doesent work. The way that i did this was to boot up a gentoo live cd inside the vm, and then chroot to the sme system, so that i was able to execute the lilo program. When i do this i get the error: Fatal cannot find device /dev/sda. I tried to check mtab and i says:

/dev/ida/c0d0p3 / ext3 rw,usrquota,grpquota 0 0
none /proc proc rw 0 0

I think this wrong because the partition is now on /dev/sda3.

Has anyone had sucess moving one of these servers, maby there is a guide out there somewhere that i might have overlooked ).

I believe there is a utility to port hardware serves to virtual serves, the process is called something like ptv or p2v (physical to virtual), I thought this would also take care of the things like changing nics etc.

I am not sure if it will also incorporate you changing discs from ide to scsi or is sda not a scsi disk?

Wouldn;t it be easier to just backup your system and do a VMWare reinstall of SME 6 (or upgrade to 7 in the process as well) and then restore your data on the virtual server?

[Troels]

Hi Cactus,

I dont know if the p2v assistant will do the trick, but the thing is it costs money, and i only have the .gho files from the old server anyway. I been trying out different things the past couple days. First i ran an upgrade on the the sme 6.0 with an sme 7, this made it boot . But i got a strange error:

mount: error 2 mounting ext3
mount: error 2 mounting none
switching to new root
switchroot failed: mount failed: 22
umount /initrd/dev failed: 2
Kernal panic - not syncing: Attempting to kill init!

Okay this looks to me like there was some of the old RAID system still in there somewhere.

Second i tried with installing a sme server 7 in a different virtual machine, so that i could compare the mtab, fstab, and grub.conf. Tried to copy them from the new vm to the one with the upgraded version of sme 6, still no luck!. Any ideas !

[mudtoe]

This may be a bit off base, but are you sure that the disk type was the same from the original system to the virtual machine, specifically IDE vs SCSI?  I'm running SME 7 in a VMWare VM, and I remember some of the initial setup screens for the VM asked about which type of disk you wanted emulated to the guest O/S.  As I recall the default disk type and recommended disk type from VMWare's software was SCSI, which isn't the usual disk found these days in real machines unless they are big time servers.  If the thing is hanging right at the start it might be because the wrong disk type is set, and as soon as the guest O/S switches from BIOS calls to the disk driver, it hangs.


mudtoe

[Troels]

Hi Mudtoe,

The original disk was a Compaq Smart Array SCSI raid 5 system and the new system is just a emulated VMware SCSI disk.

[mudtoe]

Hmmm.... that could be the problem.  I doubt that a RAID 5 disk array uses the same driver as a regular SCSI disk.   Maybe you should do the backup function on the old machine, install a fresh SME 7 on the VM, and then do a restore.  I'm not a linux expert, so I don't know if there is a way to do what in the Windows XP world is called a "repair install", which causes XP to go through all it's initial hardware detection and put in a new set of low level drivers, but leaves the applications and data intact.  One other thought, aren't there two kinds of SCSI disk emulations in VMWare?  Have you tried the other kind.  I think one was BusLogic, but I can't remember the other off hand.

[Troels]

Hi Mudtoe,

I have tried to install a fresh copy of the sever, and it works fine with the LSI logic controller ?