Making Production Drive to VDI

[bigmatlem]

I've looked through the forum and on the net and I'm confused. My brain doesn't seem to be what it used to be. I want to take a current production drive of Linux Ubuntu 12.04 server and clone it to a vdi file to make it virtual rather than take up an entire box.

I've tried most of the suggestions of VBoxManage blah blah blah and it just isn't doing what I expected.

Can someone explain it to me in simpler terms so that as a once brilliant mind that has been over taxed way too much can understand it?

Thanks.

[mpack]

Converting a physical drive to virtual is called a "P2V" for short around here. Rather, P2V refers to the complete process of making the OS image run as a VM.

I'm not aware of anyone suggesting that VBoxManage can be used to P2V. I don't even see how it could [*]. Do you have a link to those discussions?

It's easy on Windows, but I'm not aware of any Linux or Live CD code than can turn a physical drive directly into a VDI, nor even a VHD or VMDK. You can use CloneZilla to make the image, but the image will be the dumbest possible raw dump of the entire disk. You then have to convert that raw image to VDI using "VBoxManage clonehd <rawfilename> <vdifilename> --format VDI". Note that you must always image the entire disk - imaging just one partition (leaving out boot sectors and partition map) would be a common rookie mistake.

[*] well ok, if you want to be pedantic you could map a raw risk and then clone it, but that's much more cumbersome than it needs to be.