Hi List

I am brand new to OpenVZ. I will get straight to the point.

I want to  backup physical servers on remote sites with tar/dump and
restore them at our central office to  virtual machine.  Once disaster
strikes move the virtual server to a new physical server and transport
it to the remote office. 


My question: 

1) Is this possible (backup physical server and restore to virtual) ?
2) If so is there any documentation / HOWTO's or pointers that you could
give please ?

Thanks in advance.

Regards
Stefan.

Stefan Kok wrote:
> 1) Is this possible (backup physical server and restore to virtual) ?
> 2) If so is there any documentation / HOWTO's or pointers that you could
> give please ?

The basic OS would survive a tar/untar process. But there're some items 
typically missing from a VPS setting which would be vital to running on 
a physical server. The first that come to mind are module utilities 
(modprobe et al) and the modules themselves, some daemons (klogd, 
udevd), and then a few fundamental config files (fstab, lilo.conf or /boot).

I think that you probably *could* do it with a lot of effort (90% of it 
being adding new packages to the VPS after you're untarred it), but that 
if your goal is fast and reliable recovery, you'd be best off restoring 
the VPS into a VPS setting. It's not difficult or time-consuming to 
install the OpenVZ system, and they could easily have it installed by 
the time the backup drive arrived at the new office.

If the new HN already had OpenVZ, then it's trivially simple to run 
vzctl create to generate the VPS, then replace the content under 
/vz/private/X with the tar content.

-- 
Gregor Mosheh / Greg Allensworth
System Administrator, HostGIS cartographic development & hosting services
http://www.HostGIS.com/

"Remember that no one cares if you can back up,
  only if you can restore." - AMANDA

P2V migration is described in http://wiki.openvz.org/Physical_to_VE,
that involves some manual tuning.

V2P is also possible but don't make much sense to me -- it's way better
to use VE than a real server.

Stefan Kok wrote:
> Hi List
>
> I am brand new to OpenVZ. I will get straight to the point.
>
> I want to  backup physical servers on remote sites with tar/dump and
> restore them at our central office to  virtual machine.  Once disaster
> strikes move the virtual server to a new physical server and transport
> it to the remote office. 
>
>
> My question: 
>
> 1) Is this possible (backup physical server and restore to virtual) ?
> 2) If so is there any documentation / HOWTO's or pointers that you could
> give please ?
>
> Thanks in advance.
>
> Regards
> Stefan.
>

Thanks for the replies. Its helped a lot.

Stefan.

On Sat, 2007-09-15 at 13:44 +0400, Kir Kolyshkin wrote:
> P2V migration is described in http://wiki.openvz.org/Physical_to_VE,
> that involves some manual tuning.
> 
> V2P is also possible but don't make much sense to me -- it's way better
> to use VE than a real server.
> 
> Stefan Kok wrote:
> > Hi List
> >
> > I am brand new to OpenVZ. I will get straight to the point.
> >
> > I want to  backup physical servers on remote sites with tar/dump and
> > restore them at our central office to  virtual machine.  Once disaster
> > strikes move the virtual server to a new physical server and transport
> > it to the remote office. 
> >
> >
> > My question: 
> >
> > 1) Is this possible (backup physical server and restore to virtual) ?
> > 2) If so is there any documentation / HOWTO's or pointers that you could
> > give please ?
> >
> > Thanks in advance.
> >
> > Regards
> > Stefan.
> >