Difference between revisions of "Physical to container"

Revision as of 00:40, 26 October 2006

A rough description of how to migrate existing physical server into a VE.

What you need to do in order to migrate is:

Prepare an “empty” VE. For OpenVZ this would mean the following (assume you choose VE ID of 123):

mkdir /vz/root/123 /vz/private/123
cat /etc/vz/conf/ve-vps.basic.conf-sample > /etc/vz/conf/123.conf

Stop most services on a machine to be migrated. “Most” means services such as web server, databases and the like — so you will not loose your data. Just leave the bare minimum (including ssh).

Copy all your data from the machine to an OpenVZ box. Say you'll be using VE with ID of 123, then all the data should be placed to /vz/private/123/ directory (so there will be directories such as /vz/private/123/bin, etc, var and so on). This could be done by scp or rsync.

Set some VE parameters. You have to add OSTEMPLATE=xxx line to /etc/vz/conf/123.conf file, where xxx would be distribution name (like debian-3.0) for vzctl to be able to make changes specific for this distribution.

Also, you have to supply an IP for a new VE:

vzctl set 123 --ipadd x.x.x.x --save

You have to edit some files inside a VE. For example, virtual server does not have real ttys, so you have to disable getty in /etc/inittab (i. e. /vz/private/123/etc/inittab). Also, link /etc/mtab to /proc/mounts.

sed -i -e '/getty/d' /vz/private/123/etc/inittab
rm -f /vz/private/123/etc/mtab
ln -s /proc/mounts /vz/private/123/etc/mtab

There might be other adjustments needed.

vzctl start 123

If anything goes wrong, try to find out why and fix. If you have enough Linux experience, it can be handled.

@@ Line 10: / Line 10: @@
 * Stop most services on a machine to be migrated. “Most” means services such as web server, databases and the like — so you will not loose your data. Just leave the bare minimum (including ssh).
-* Copy all your data from the machine to an OpenVZ box. Say you'll be using VE with ID of 123, then all the data should be placed to <code>/vz/private/123/</code> directory (so there will be directories such as <code>/vz/private/123/bin</code>, <code>etc</code>, <code>var</code> and so on).
+* Copy all your data from the machine to an OpenVZ box. Say you'll be using VE with ID of 123, then all the data should be placed to <code>/vz/private/123/</code> directory (so there will be directories such as <code>/vz/private/123/bin</code>, <code>etc</code>, <code>var</code> and so on). This could be done by scp or rsync.
 * Set some VE parameters. You have to add <code>OSTEMPLATE=xxx</code> line to <code>/etc/vz/conf/123.conf</code> file, where <code>xxx</code> would be distribution name (like <code>debian-3.0</code>) for vzctl to be able to make changes specific for this distribution.