Sean Fitzpatrick My thoughts are my own..

P2V’ing CentOS5.1 with an LVM

So this week I accepted the task of P2V'ing a machine for one of our customers that has long been 'untouched' for years.  Doing some initial digging I found that the machine was built using CentOS5.1 or otherwise known as the free RHEL5.1 kernel (2.4.x).  Doing some brain storming with a fellow colleague we discussed the various options of getting the machine from a physical to virtual status, with the least amount of possibilities in failing the kernel and having to start over.  The following options were considered:

Clonezilla
VMware P2V
Shadowprotect Image Creator
Using a Netbackup Restore
Doing a hot rsync transfer of the kernel.

After some deliberation, we decided that we would try the Clonezilla image.  Of course taking this course required that we have a downtime for the machine so that it could be properly cold imaged.

Unfortunately, the clonezilla images did not work, and we ended up going with a P2V.  Since, the images did not work, the task of getting the P2V was passed to me, since I have the experience with Linux and VMware that would be required to get this working.

After about 4 hours of waiting for the p2v to finish, I was finally able to try and turn the VM on and see what happened.  Not being suprised, first time I powered on the vm I received a kernel panic.  So I did a google search to see if the centos5.1 kernel was even still available, and sure enough after about 15 minutes of searching, I finally found the iso's that I was looking for.

Next step, to boot the vm up in safe mode to see what I was dealing with.  Good news, safe mode found the kernel, but had to mount it as /mnt/sysimage; unfortunately this means that there is a driver issue and the machine was unable to locate the correct drive on the boot.  So I started through the process of rotating through the drivers, first starting with the LSI Logic drivers (mptbase, mptscsih); tried a reboot, no success.  Note: I also tried recreating the boot by reruning setup, but this also did not help.

What ended up working was changing the drivers in /etc/modprobe.conf to use the mptbase driver on the main scsiadapter, and all other scsiadapters to use the ata_piix driver, then running kudzu, and then doing a mkinitrd kernel.smb.img kernel.img, reboot, and bingo it booted.

Also to note, I rebooted after changing the /etc/modprobe.conf file original, and was able to do an lvdisplay, pvdisplay, vgdisplay and show all lvms present and accounted for, I think this was the key to stepping forward.  Also good to remember that if your boot/os is not on an LVM, booting into safe mode constantly to fix this is not needed, it can all be done while the kernel is running live.

Here's a helpful VMware thread I found