Migrating a physical 64bit Linux to become a guest OS on VM

Hi all!

In a little while I will be transferring a physical 64bit Linux machine to become a guest OS on a (yet to be installed/configured) virtual machine host.
I’m still hesitating a bit between KVM, VirtualBox & VMware for this host.

If I choose for KVM, how easy will it be to migrate the HD with the partitions of the physical server to become a guest OS on the virtual machine host?
Is it as simple as creating images & config for the guest machine, mounting both these and the physical disk containing the originals, and doing a ‘cp -a’?
Will this work with KVM?

Any thoughts, info & help is greatly appreciated!

[quote=“Evert”]Hi all!

In a little while I will be transferring a physical 64bit Linux machine to become a guest OS on a (yet to be installed/configured) virtual machine host.
I’m still hesitating a bit between KVM, VirtualBox & VMware for this host.

If I choose for KVM, how easy will it be to migrate the HD with the partitions of the physical server to become a guest OS on the virtual machine host?
Is it as simple as creating images & config for the guest machine, mounting both these and the physical disk containing the originals, and doing a ‘cp -a’?
Will this work with KVM?

Any thoughts, info & help is greatly appreciated![/quote]

you can just use qemu-img to convert the hard disk data to an image

ie

swap qcow2 with your format of choice, be it raw or whatever.

you could also use dd also to create a raw image.