On Mon, Jul 18, 2011 at 2:32 PM, Joshua Penix <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Jul 18, 2011, at 11:16 AM, Derek J. Balling wrote:
>
>> Has anyone here done an ESX->XenServer migration before? Tips? Tricks? 
>> Gotchas? Tools that you used that you said "Holy crap that made everything 
>> easy!"?

I have some old VMware images that I need to move over. Citrix has
tools for converting a VMware image to a Xen image; I've only used it
on vendor's images, and it worked once and failed once. I plan on
simply rebuilding those service on new images.

> The biggest gotcha is that XenServer wants Linux guests to be 
> paravirtualized, which means that you have to prepare a compatible kernel 
> prior to the migration.  Depending on your Linux distributions, this may 
> already be in place or may just be a quick package install away.

We use Ubuntu and build our own templates. With every version of
Ubuntu and/or Xen we need to tweak the template creation process a
bit, but it isn't that fiddly. (Xen 5.6 fp1 makes a few grub related
fixes unnecessary, for example.) All the Ubuntu images are
paravirtualized but I've run them in HVM mode too (and have needed to
convert a PVM to HVM and back when an update goes wrong and I need to
boot the VM off a recovery disk or whatever).

We have a few FreeBSD VMs too but haven't tried to paravirtualize
them. They use up slightly more resources than a PVM Linux image does,
but not too much so and we have had no problems with stability. Of
course we can't use live-migration on non-PVM images.

-- 
Perfection is just a word I use occasionally with mustard.
--Atom Powers--
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