[ale] virtualize a FC6 box to a vmware image

[brian at polibyte.com (Brian Pitts)]

Jerry Yu wrote:
> I have a FC6 box running wordpress. It became desirable to convert it to 
> a vmware instance.  'vmware converter' and it asked me for domain\user 
> to convert a remote physical server?!   Any vmware (quick) way w/o 
> doing  full backup & restore I usually do?

I don't think the vmware converter supports linux. Take a look at 
http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=82173&tstart=0 . 
They recommend something like

- Enable ssh access in the source system
- Create a vm for the target system
- Boot the vm with a linux live-cd (System Rescue CD or RIP are light ones)
- Setup the network in the vm as usual
- mount the virtual hd destination partition. Eg. mount /dev/hda /mnt/dest
- rsync -av --numeric-ids --exclude=/dev,/proc,/sys 
root at ip-source:/dev/hd(source-partition)/ /mnt/dest/
- mkdir /mnt/dest/{dev,proc,sys}
- adjust the bootloader and fstab of the virtual system to reflect the 
new root
- umount /mnt/dest
- reboot vm

-Brian