Planning to do a P2V conversion, same box, what should I be on the look out for?

[Andy Huang]

First post, not even sure where to start

I have 5 drives in hardware RAID 6 right now. I ordered a 6th drive today, of same capacity, with intention to do a P2V conversion. Here are the steps I am planning to take for the process, can you guys please point stuff out if I am messing up big time and on path to destroy my data?

1. I intend to backup all my data from RAID to the new drive following instructions here: http://geekyprojects.com/storage/how-to-clone-hard-drive-to-smaller-drive/ I know the raw data will fit, as my total used is less than that of a single drive by about 25%. (146G SAS, formats, and binary math brings it down to about 135G or so; only 100G of data on RAID).
2. I intend to install from baremetal ISO on to the RAID, while not touching my extra drive.
3. I intend to make a new KVM instance, and dd if=/dev/_separate_drive_ bs=1024 > /somewhere/on/physical/disk.img, which I can then mount in the newly created KVM instance.

Is it really this simple? Is there something I should look out for? Is there something else I am missing? Hopefully I can be well prepared before I start next week

 

[udo]

First post, not even sure where to start

I have 5 drives in hardware RAID 6 right now. I ordered a 6th drive today, of same capacity, with intention to do a P2V conversion. Here are the steps I am planning to take for the process, can you guys please point stuff out if I am messing up big time and on path to destroy my data?

1. I intend to backup all my data from RAID to the new drive following instructions here: http://geekyprojects.com/storage/how-to-clone-hard-drive-to-smaller-drive/ I know the raw data will fit, as my total used is less than that of a single drive by about 25%. (146G SAS, formats, and binary math brings it down to about 135G or so; only 100G of data on RAID).
2. I intend to install from baremetal ISO on to the RAID, while not touching my extra drive.
3. I intend to make a new KVM instance, and dd if=/dev/_separate_drive_ bs=1024 > /somewhere/on/physical/disk.img, which I can then mount in the newly created KVM instance.

Is it really this simple? Is there something I should look out for? Is there something else I am missing? Hopefully I can be well prepared before I start next week

Hi,
yes this should work. OK, you have for the transfer time the data not protected by an raid, but this should not very dangerous .
I would only save the data to the disk instead of repartitioning without an valid backup (tar, clonezilla, rsync - depends on the system and/or data).

BTW. with 5 drives in raid 6 you have only the space of 3 drives - I would go for raid10 with 6 drives (you have a good usement for the new drive) - the same size as with raid6 but much more speed!!

Udo

 

[Andy Huang]

Hi,
yes this should work. OK, you have for the transfer time the data not protected by an raid, but this should not very dangerous .
I would only save the data to the disk instead of repartitioning without an valid backup (tar, clonezilla, rsync - depends on the system and/or data).

BTW. with 5 drives in raid 6 you have only the space of 3 drives - I would go for raid10 with 6 drives (you have a good usement for the new drive) - the same size as with raid6 but much more speed!!

Udo

Ah, I didn't think of rsync. Yes, I think rsync will work much better than dd. Live system is Debian 6.0.6, so rsync should work as long as I skip /sys, /dev, /proc, /media, and /mnt... Though, I need to look up how to keep the boot menu working after rsync, so if things go south, I can rsync back to the RAID and re-try.

As for the RAID thing, it is an interesting thought, but I don't think I will do it because of two reasons: 1) I don't trust RAID 10; while both RAID setup (6 and 10) allows for potentially 2 drives to fail, if the stars doesn't like up properly, and with my crappy luck, I might lose the entire array with RAID 10 when the mirror'ed drive fails. Also, 2) I don't think I can convert the current 5 disk RAID 6 array into a RAID 10 easily with all 6 disks. Maybe I can re-initialize it as a 4 disk RAID 10 array, and then some how add the other two in when I am all done, but I'm not sure how I would do that last bit (adding 2 more disks to the 4 disk RAID 10 array) in the RAID controller.

Thanks!

I'm still really worried about the conversion process. Especially seeing how some people are reporting migration failed on the forums in the last few weeks. But I suppose we don't really see migration success threads since there'd be no reason to post