proxmoz system "forklift" help

[jerrys]

Hi,

I am new to proxmox and have a slightly unusual task I want to use it for. In the long run this will be your typical proxmox setup with containers and VMs in a cluster.

I am an IT consultant that is working for a small engineering group and there are strong reasons to believe that some of their systems have been compromised. These are Centos systems. One machine in particular needs to be recovered in a safe way and it's functions extracted into multiple VMs.

I have added a small disk that is running proxmox and I am looking to use this to safely work on the suspect system in place. I can mount the system disk and look at the files and I can do simple things like chroot and reset passwords. The real thing I need to do is run these disks as a VM without networking and use the console to access and take the machines apart.

How can I use the existing disk as a VM in proxmox? How can I set the VM up with no networking?

thanks in advance,
jerry

 

[mir]

use dd to make a raw image of the disk -> A lot of tips can be read here: http://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Migration_of_servers_to_Proxmox_VE
For no networking simply avoid adding any nic to the VM.

 

[jerrys]

Hi,

I was hoping to avoid the copy and use the disk in place. One is a 4TB raid and that would be a pain to copy.

jerry

 

[Mr.Holmes]

Hi,

I was hoping to avoid the copy and use the disk in place. One is a 4TB raid and that would be a pain to copy.

jerry

Hopefully possible in your case!

Recently I had a similar case and resolved it as follows:

- removed the physical disk where the VMs were stored and connected to an empty (resp. to be overwritten) one; not the standard installation process possibly makes changes on all existing disks

- made a standard install of proxmox

- connected the previously disk again (and mounted the existing filesystem of course) - ensured that BIOS boots from disk where proxmox had been installed (otherwise the bootloader has to be adapted)

- defined a datastore containing "images" on that filesystem (by GUI)

- moved (renamed) existing virtual disk(s) to <datastore-dir>/images/<disk-name> corresponding to HW-configuration for VM which has the structure <datastore-name>:<disk-name>

all other actions according to usual migration method

Note: the VM configuration can be edited by GUI or directly in file /etc/pve/qemu-server/<vm-id>.conf