Migrating a bare metal server to a VM on proxmox

[TimRyan]

I have a collection of Dell R610 and R710 servers several of which I have scrubbed and built a Proxmox cluster out of on PVE 7.2. It works very well and after trying a number of cloud server environments, this is definitely the best available platform. The snag is that I have two more Dell R710's with Ubuntu Server 20.04 installed and applications running on that I need to migrate to the cluster to free up the hardware to add to the cluster.

Is there a utility that will let me migrate the installed OS's and files sets to VM's on the cluster I have already built? Is there a best practices method to achieve that goal?

 

[LnxBil]

Have you looked at this guide yet? Migrating Linux is normally very easy in comparison to Windows.

 

[TimRyan]

I did but on the first read thru it looked like it was targeted on migrating windows and I am migrating Ubuntu Server 22.04.1 instances operating with web content. I will give it another look. Thanks

 

[thebox]

Same here i read through it and did no find the answer to Ubuntu bare metal to VM.

 

[TimRyan]

With what I have learned since then , that is a practice I would avoid at all costs. There are just too many variables that could come back to bite you. I migrated from PVE 7 to PVW 8.1.4 and Ubuntu 20 to 22.04 and Debian through three versions. The better exercise would a new scratch build of a new cluster on the latest PVE and Debian releases with the latest Ubuntu 22.04.3 VM installations with fresh app installations that are targeted to the benefits of the latest releases. Then import the DB's and content.

This is not to suggest that there might be extra work, but far less than migrating old stuff at the OS and VM levels and then having to do ongoing upgrades. The only thing I run on bare metal is the PVE modified Debian releases, and Bookworm is the place to start.

 

[jdancer]

Search online for P2V (physical to virtual) converters. Most common ones convert it to ESXi (vmdk) but 'qemu-img convert' can convert vmdk to qcow2 or raw format.