Building a Custom Virt-P2V Live CD For Linux

This document will teach you how to build a Virt-P2V Live CD.

Virt-P2V is a Live CD for migrating physical machines to virtual machine guests.

In the simplest mode of operation, you take a pre-built Live CD ISO from the main website (http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-p2v/) and burn it to a CD-R. Then insert the CD-R into the physical machine which must be migrated, reboot, and follow the on-screen instructions. See STANDARD USAGE section below.

You may also build a customized Live CD. Typically this will contain things like server details specific to your organization, so that the Live CD can run mostly or completely automatically. See BUILDING A CUSTOM LIVE CD section below.

In both cases, files and disk images are transferred from the physical machine over the network to the virtualization host machine over ssh. Therefore sshd must be running on the virtualization host, and must be accessible to that host. See SERVER REQUIREMENTS section below.

The Virt-P2V script must only be run from the Live CD. It isn't designed to run outside this environment and could do Bad Things to your machine if you try it. The script contains some checks to try to stop you from doing this.

Virt-P2V does not modify the physical machine, its disks, configuration etc.