I have seen the documentation saying to build an empty VM with slightly more space for each volume than was on the physical server, then use clonezilla to create an image of the server, then import it. That seems ok, but I’m hoping someone out there has more real-world experience in doing this and can share if they did it differently, or encountered any pitfalls.
As my environment matures, I am moving from “Hey I have 1 physical server with everything on it” to “Let’s use a hypervisor and spin off services onto their own.” When the base OS is P2V’d, I’ll be able to have 2 hypervisors and start implementing HA. I’ve been using this system as a scratchpad and dev box for 10 years and would love to just migrate it over.
A looking time ago I got 2 r710s for cheap. One was a test server which had Ubuntu server with a desktop environment on it (I was used to windows server administration) and the other was a headless Minecraft server. Both have about 200 gigs of RAM, but similar CPU configs. Every self hosting thing I tried went on the main server…DHCP, DNS, jellyfin, NextCloud, Apache, vaultWarden…it got out of hand. Even then, I used the desktop over x2go as a stable environment when moving between clients. We replaced the Minecraft server, then I converted that to proxmox, then peeled off services into smaller VMs in learning to use Ansible. Now every “server” is moved off and I basically want the underlying VM as a remote desktop. It isn’t precious per se, and it is backed up, but starting over would be a headache so I wanna take a real shot at P2V.