Best way to P2V for Proxmox?

[Proxfan2025]

Hi.

I would like to P2V up to 50 Windows machines to Proxmox.

Converting with Disk2VHD to VHDX and importing to Raw files is a bit of a pain. Because the hassle of typing the qm importdisk command and attaching it to the receiving VMs will be 50 times.

Is there any way to convert physical machines directly to a raw or qcow2 file? I assume I would need software to run on a USB stick for booting.

 

[B.Otto]

What could work is use Clonezilla with their Local-Remote setting.

Get the Clonezilla image and put it on an USB stick to boot from. Create a VM with all the required settings and boot from the Clonezilla ISO. Then you have two Clonezilla sessions and you can Clone the HDDs from the physical to the virtual machine.

You have to pay attention on whether the Hosts use BIOS or UEFI though and configure the VM accordingly.

Works great with Linux hosts, I havent tried it out with Windows hosts yet.

 

[LnxBil]

Converting with Disk2VHD to VHDX and importing to Raw files is a bit of a pain. Because the hassle of typing the qm importdisk command and attaching it to the receiving VMs will be 50 times.

Is there any way to convert physical machines directly to a raw or qcow2 file? I assume I would need software to run on a USB stick for booting.

USB stick? You're complaining about 50x running a command on each host (which is totalle scriptable) but want to plug in a USB sticks 50 times instead?

As always .. it depends .. but what you could do is to get clonezilla netboot working and script everything so that you just need to boot via PXE and that's it. That is the highest automation level I know of and what I would do if I were you.

 

[Proxfan2025]

USB stick? You're complaining about 50x running a command on each host (which is totalle scriptable) but want to plug in a USB sticks 50 times instead?

As always .. it depends .. but what you could do is to get clonezilla netboot working and script everything so that you just need to boot via PXE and that's it. That is the highest automation level I know of and what I would do if I were you.

I guess I didn't word it well enough, Disk2VHD converts to VHDX first, which involves logging into Windows, opening the converter, uploading the vhdx file. Thereafter I type the qm import command. Scripting would alleviate this, but I didn't think the whole process was smart.

On the other hand, a USB stick like Clonezilla is smart because it can convert directly to raw, independent of the OS environment, even though it requires physical excersize.

And yes, Clonezilla netboot sounds more advanced. Will consider PXE environment for scalability. Thanks.

 

[Proxfan2025]

What could work is use Clonezilla with their Local-Remote setting.

Get the Clonezilla image and put it on an USB stick to boot from. Create a VM with all the required settings and boot from the Clonezilla ISO. Then you have two Clonezilla sessions and you can Clone the HDDs from the physical to the virtual machine.

You have to pay attention on whether the Hosts use BIOS or UEFI though and configure the VM accordingly.

Works great with Linux hosts, I havent tried it out with Windows hosts yet.

Thanks! Clonezilla seems to have more features than what I imagined. More importantly, it's free to use in labo environment, compared to Windows server's MDT or WDS features. Let me post further questions once I tried it. Have a good day!

 

[LnxBil]

Thanks! Clonezilla seems to have more features than what I imagined. More importantly, it's free to use in labo environment, compared to Windows server's MDT or WDS features. Let me post further questions once I tried it. Have a good day!

Perfect! We use it also for various tasks. We also have dedicated netboot servers for special physical machines (e.g. a notebook series we bought in bulk). So that we have all machines with a common mac prefix hardcoded to this netboot machine which only provides images for those laptops. This is fully automatable and so much fun to watch they work while you just watch and sip coffee

 

[Proxfan2025]

Thanks LnxBill, Mac prefix filtering sounds very advanced. I am also looking into FOG server now. It looks like a newer imaging software similar to CloneZilla.

 

[pvps1]

Perfect! We use it also for various tasks. We also have dedicated netboot servers for special physical machines (e.g. a notebook series we bought in bulk). So that we have all machines with a common mac prefix hardcoded to this netboot machine which only provides images for those laptops. This is fully automatable and so much fun to watch they work while you just watch and sip coffee

clonezilla multicast setups ftw
(massiv parallel setups of 50 pce cpe per run, back in the days....)

 

[Proxfan2025]

clonezilla multicast setups ftw
(massiv parallel setups of 50 pce cpe per run, back in the days....)

Thank you! It seems that CloneZilla is really overwhelming in a small office environment!
Setting up a multicast network is a bit difficult for me, but I will try.