Thanks Rich. I'm buried today but I will try with F14 and post the results here. - Greg -----Original Message----- From: Richard W.M. Jones [mailto:rjones@redhat.com] Sent: Friday, June 24, 2011 7:28 AM To: Greg Scott Cc: libguestfs@redhat.com; mbooth@redhat.com Subject: Re: [Libguestfs] Trying to get started with virt-p2v On Thu, Jun 23, 2011 at 10:10:38AM -0500, Greg Scott wrote:

I need to p2v migrate a Windows server and I am soooo confused!

I've updated the web site here: http://libguestfs.org/virt-v2v/

By now, I've done a few virt-v2v migrations, so I get how that works. I attended Richard and Matthew's Red Hat Summit talk about virt-p2v and just now downloaded the handouts.

If I understand what's going on, virt-p2v is pretty much the same as virt-v2v, except that the physical system to migrate from needs to boot from a live CD, so that virt-v2v can connect to it. OK, makes sense.

How do I get my hands on an ISO of this live CD?

You have to build it yourself using 'virt-p2v-image-builder'. NOTE #1: Since Fedora 15 started to use systemd and this deeply changes the way live images work, and since Matt has not tested this, it's best to stick with Fedora 14 for now. Running F14 from a VM is sufficient to build the ISO. NOTE #2: When we finally release this for RHEL 6.2, we will ship a prebuilt ISO to customers from RHN. Fedora users and others (Debian etc) will still need to run virt-p2v-image-builder.

Matthew's handout points to a new RPM called virt-p2v-image-builder. I see there's a Fedora 15 flavor of this RPM - but it has a bunch of dependencies. So I built up a Fedora 15 VM running as a guest on a RHEL 6.1 system. From inside my Fedora 15 VM, I do yum install virt-v2v-image-builder. This installs cleanly and takes care of dependencies.

Great, so now what?

I found a script - /usr/bin/virt-v2v-image-builder and ran it (but first must chmod 755 to make it work). This ran for a while and sat there like a bump on a log. After a while, I tried ctrl/C but nothing happened. So I did CTRL/Z and then kill -9 all the subprocesses it created. I tried again, doing sh -v ./virt-v2v-image-builder this time so I could get a feel for what was happening. It ran through a bunch of code and eventually blew up with an error, "Failed to find package - 'Rubygenm-virt-p2v'". What in the world does this mean?

OK, clearly I don't know what I'm doing.

man virt-p2v doesn't exist.

But I found some online documentation here: http://people.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-p2v/virt-p2v.1.html

This mentions a pre-built ISO on Richard's site, but following the

I see a warning that it's all being re-written. And the link to the ISO doesn't work. There's another link on Richard's site that says all

Please ignore this page. It refers to the very old version which was completely different. In fact I have now made this page redirect to the new site. link, the

download info I need is in the handouts from Matthew's talk.

But I went through Richard's talk and am having serious trouble trying to figure out how to use virt-v2v-image-builder. I'm not seeing any man pages for it and haven't found a writeup on how to use it.

But why go to the trouble to build a unique live CD? Maybe there's a new pre-built ISO available someplace?

I would definitely appreciate any guidance.

Matt may be able to help you with the other questions, but I'd definitely suggest using Fedora 14 and building the ISO. Rich. -- Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones virt-df lists disk usage of guests without needing to install any software inside the virtual machine. Supports Linux and Windows. http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-df/

On 28/06/11 18:22, Greg Scott wrote:

As promised...results so far.

I built up a Fedora 14 VM and did "yum install virt-v2v". This downloaded and installed a bazillion dependencies and ran successfully to completion. Next, I did "virt-p2v-image-builder". This downloaded and installed a bunch more stuff and successfully ran to completion. And it created an ISO file named /home/gregs/virt-p2v.iso. So far so good.

I burned the ISO to a CD, brought it over to a test PC and booted it. The boot hangs in a blue colored Fedora screen and just stops. OK, that PC is an old piece of junk Dell Optiplex. But it's been good enough to run Windows for several years.

The boot CD needs to work with a wide variety of hardware, including piece of junk Dell Optiplexes. This requires thought.

Trying again on my much nicer Lenovo laptop - this time it boots into the virt-p2v screen. It shows me that eth0 is connected after I finally plugged in the cable. And then it rebooted?!?

It goes without saying that shouldn't happen :)

Ahh - I see what I did wrong. I always hit ESC when Fedora boots cuz I want to see what's going on.

That shouldn't make any difference. Plus, I didn't have the Ethernet cable

connected.

That shouldn't make any difference either, but it's possible there could be bug. The laptop rebooted, this time it came to the "Connect to

conversion server" screen.

So now I think I'm ready to try a test with a real server.

I think it's clear we need some way to extract debug info from the P2V boot image. Right now P2V simply reboots immediately on completion, whether successful or not. There are 2 situations we need to cover: 1. P2V client doesn't launch (including boot failure) 2. P2V client fails. The main problem, of course, is where to put it... Greg, thanks for your efforts. I'm going to have to think about how we can handle this better. Matt -- Matthew Booth, RHCA, RHCSS Red Hat Engineering, Virtualisation Team GPG ID: D33C3490 GPG FPR: 3733 612D 2D05 5458 8A8A 1600 3441 EA19 D33C 3490

...

The main problem, of course, is where to put it...

Yup

We had pretty much the same problem with the old virt-p2v too. That used to save a log file into /tmp (on the ramdisk), and gave users a shell on one of the virtual consoles (Alt + F2 etc) so that users could switch to that shell and scp the debug file elsewhere. It wasn't exactly an ideal solution.

I'm not sure what else you could do with debug info - maybe save it the same way and then if it crashes or fails for some reason, document for the user how to retrieve the debug info and copy it someplace. Or in cases where the original boot hangs, it might not get far enough to save any debug info. My old Dell Optiplex is a GX280 small form factor, vintage 2004 or so. I bought it used a few years ago - the fan speeds up when it gets busy and slows down when it's idle. And the motherboard got really hot a few years ago. Still . . . if Windows XP runs on it . . . It probably needs some oddball Dell driver for a cheap component that doesn't exist anymore, built in a small village somewhere in China for $1 cheaper than any other source. :) Most P2Vs will probably be on servers anyway. I'll be happy to do some testing with anything I have here. I have some ancient Compaq Proliant servers - Compaq, not HP - and I also have some newer stuff. And I'll be doing some RHEV p2V migrations with customers, one project in the next few days. Maybe it could be a case study at the next Summit. - Greg