Migrating guest to physical machine

[memilanuk]

Hello,

I apologize in advance if this is covered somewhere; I did a handful of searches and didn't find anything that appeared close. If I missed something please nudge me in the proper direction

What I want to do is 'mock up' a network server in Virtualbox; get it all set up and all the services working the way I want before taking down a working physical machine. The thing is... once I get everything setup once, it seems like a minor waste to replicate everything (and count on getting it exactly right twice ) by installing from scratch again; granted some things like driver, network settings and such will have to be adjusted after the physical machine boots up. But mainly I'm curious if anyone has tried essentially 'cloning' a working installation from a virtual machine to a physical machine with any degree of success? Will utilities such as Clonezilla and the like work with virtual machines?

TIA,

Monte

[Sasquatch]

Will utilities such as Clonezilla and the like work with virtual machines?

Yes, those tools will work. Now it depends on the OS you want to migrate. Linux is very easy, it's not that picky about different hardware, the only thing you have to keep an eye on is the UUID of the hard drive and the NIC names. Both can be corrected if you boot from a live CD or rescue disc.
Windows is an entirely different story. That's a real pain when it's on different hardware than it was installed on. There are already some topics about this. For Windows, see the howto in Windows Guests about dual booting it from bare metal and VM. Some steps apply to your conversion.

[memilanuk]

Thanks for the quick response!

My primary interest was in Linux; I have a functional backup/file server running Ubuntu 8.04.3 LTS with a system drive and two storage drives in a software RAID 1 config. I was hoping to put together a similar virtual machine inside Virtualbox (although the storage drives would have to be somewhat smaller than 500GB apiece!) and get everything sorted out before moving in and mucking up the physical machine Although I am wondering if the process of migrating different sized drives, software RAID and LVM as well as all the server stuff might be more trouble (for one machine) than absolutely necessary. Still, it seems like it'd make for an interesting exercise...

Thanks,

Monte

[Sasquatch]

I would personally migrate the OS alone and leave the RAID/LVM until that's working on the new environment. That way, you can just copy the data to where it is on the VM. I don't think a software RAID, nor LVM allows easy transfer through images.