[Gllug] Cloning running servers

[Simon Wilcox]

Dear all,

I have half a dozen Debian servers that we want to migrate into a VMware 
virtualised environment. Whilst VMware has tools to migrate Windows 
servers there isn't an equivalent for the linux world.

My google-fu has deserted me today and I can't find any handy utility 
that can do this with the minimum of downtime. It probably already 
exists for migrating to new hardware or into a Xen VM but I can't find it.

What I'm looking for is a tool that can image a running partition and 
copy it to the new device. The hardware profile will be different but 
we're running stock kernels so I'm hopeful that they will cope.

Once we have the server running under VMware we can use rsync to copy 
across the few changing files during a short downtime window.

It's getting the image across in the first place that I'm a bit stuck on.

Any advice gratefully received as I really don't want to have to 
reinstall the base OS into the VM and rsync the data across.

Simon.
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