Clone Linux computers (either physical or virtual) to Xen, VMware, Qemu or others.
This article describes the process, used here at Wombat Technology, to move various Linux computers (distributions) from one physical/VM environment to another.
Wombat Technology has the functional requirement to be able to distribute complete "appliances", which in our case, consist of Enterprise Search Engines. In the old days we'd actually provide a physical computer based on IBM 32 or 64 bit computers and install the machine into a customer's rack in the basement computer room of their building. As time went on we'd find that customers would have a hardware agreement with this supplier or that, meaning we'd have to install on other hardware/Linux-distro combinations.
Then came virtualization. Firstly is was QEMU and UML (User Mode Linux). VMWare hit the scene in a big way. More recently Fedora 6 with XEN (2006-2007 at the time of writing). Microsoft has even joined the fray (and there are others - please forgive me). VT capable CPUs allowing hardware virtualization and Xen style para-virtualization have changed the landscape.
From the WombatTech perspective virtualization technology comes from heaven. We now need only support one distribution of Linux. The "reference" machine can be cloned from Xen to VMWare, QEMU and Microsoft (although MS has not been tested yet).
From the customer's perspective, one simply provides the care and feeding of virtual machines, which consists of memory, disks and network infrastructure. Hosts can be Linux based (VMWare ESX, QEMU and XEN) or WIndows (MS's virtual infrastructure and QEMU). As a general principle, guests can be Linux (RedHat, Suse, Debian, Fedora ....), Windows (various server versions or clients) and even Mac OSes and Novell servers. It seems all hosts can run all guest combinations. And hence this article (but only Linux guests here - not Windows).
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Clone Linux to Xen, VMware or Qemu.
