Migrate/Clone from OpenVZ server?

[MattS]

Hi, I've just inherited responsibility for a Proxmox server after a colleague left and so far, Ive not run into any problems. However, at a remote office that we have that is being permanently closed, we also have what I believe is a server running OpenVZ (or at least it's using something that needs vzXXXX type commands to interact with the containers). I'm totally new to Linux based virtualisation (he was Linux, I'm Windows and the assumption is I must understand it all within 10 minutes), hence me not being entirely sure what this remote server is running. Is there any striaghtforward way to migrate or clone those remote containers on to our local Proxmox server. The remote server is currently 400 miles away and is an ancient low spec Dell 2650 so probably not even worth the effort of getting it transported to us here to work on locally.

Thanks for any advice.

 

[oguz]

hi,

is the other server also running an older version of proxmox? if yes then it's trivial to migrate these containers [0]

beware this method will work only if the other server is also proxmox. otherwise you can use more traditional methods like creating a tar archive of the container root filesystem and extracting the contents on a freshly installed lxc container

[0]: https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Convert_OpenVZ_to_LXC

 

[MattS]

Thanks Oguz.

I'm not sure what is installed, to be honest.

It may well be a "roll your own" type install that he did 10 years ago but it's certainly undocumented. The base installation looks to be a CentOS 6.4 install so it's definitely not a bare metal type Proxmox install, if nothing else. There's no obvious management interface to it, just the usual vz commands to interact with the containers.

Unbelievably, there's about 20 containers running on this server with 16gb RAM so it's been doing pretty well, though obviously internal user use only.

 

[oguz]

The base installation looks to be a CentOS 6.4 install so it's definitely not a bare metal type Proxmox install, if nothing else. There's no obvious management interface to it, just the usual vz commands to interact with the containers.

tar'ing it is the way to go then..

on your PVE machine transfer the archive to the new container and unpack it inside