[SOLVED] Questions on 2012R2 P2V

[cosmos]

Hello all,

I've got a live 2012R2 server, with no Hyper-V functionality enabled. I'm considering doing a P2V of this system, after taking into account https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Migration_of_servers_to_Proxmox_VE as well as the wiki Proxmox best practices for 2012R2. I do have some questions though:

1) I've taken a vhdx image of the server with disk2vhd. It's a 1Tb disk, mainly unused. I just need 200Gb. Can fsarchiver be used to clone this 1Tb content to a 200Gb raw disk perhaps?

2) Regarding access, the metal has just an Intel ICH10 Raid controller with 2 disks on mirrored mode. Which way would you recommend to set the actual win2k12 disk? LVM perhaps and then a .raw partition on this LVM container, or other method?

3) Once created, which way would you recommend to access the server visually? Via SPICE or Remote desktop? Mainly interested in stability here.

 

[spirit]

1) I've taken a vhdx image of the server with disk2vhd. It's a 1Tb disk, mainly unused. I just need 200Gb. Can fsarchiver be used to clone this 1Tb content to a 200Gb raw disk perhaps?

you can use "qemu-img convert" with "-S" to convert from vhdx to raw with sparse option.

2) Regarding access, the metal has just an Intel ICH10 Raid controller with 2 disks on mirrored mode. Which way would you recommend to set the actual win2k12 disk? LVM perhaps and then a .raw partition on this LVM container, or other method?

you can use raw,lvm, what you want, it's transparent for the guest os.
What you need to do, is to use ide drive in your vm configuration , then install virtio drivers, and change disk to virtio.
(see proxmox wiki documentation)

3) Once created, which way would you recommend to access the server visually? Via SPICE or Remote desktop? Mainly interested in stability here.

[/QUOTE]
you can use vnc console (as you'll need to reconfigure network), or rdp after that

 

[cosmos]

Thanks for the reply mate!

you can use "qemu-img convert" with "-S" to convert from vhdx to raw with sparse option.

Isn't this going to hurt performance a lot?

you can use raw,lvm, what you want, it's transparent for the guest os.

I know, I was mainly asking for a best practice, considering what I have in hand (just a simple RAID-1 setup with 2 disks).

What you need to do, is to use ide drive in your vm configuration , then install virtio drivers, and change disk to virtio.
(see proxmox wiki documentation)

Yes, I've done that (even though I must say that on my internal testing I did not have any improvement from switching to virtio, on a couple of Windows 7 VMs for some reason...)

you can use vnc console (as you'll need to reconfigure network), or rdp after that

If you are referring to the initial setup, that won't be an issue, I can connect from the PVE console directly to the VM. I was talking for a "production" case: is it worth setting the display adapter to Qxl and accessing the 2k12r2 server via SPICE or is RDP a much better alternative?

 

[spirit]

for the convert, il will read/write the disk by block of 4K, sequentially.
Sure, it'll use storage ressource during the convertion. If you are afraid of performance, you can do it on your desktop or empty server.

Use virtio disk, ide are pretty slow (lack of parallism and performance).
Same for nics.


For management, use rdp. (spice is more for vdi, when you need to play video or high bandwith application on thinclient)

 

[cosmos]

You're awesome, thanks, just what I wanted to find!