Acronis

Hot imaging Linux servers to a virtual environment

Hi folks, I wanted to discuss hot imaging of Linux servers. Often you will run into a situation where you need to migrate an existing Linux server into a virtual environment.

The downside is that you might not want to power it down to do this and use something like VConverter or PlateSpin Migrate. These products can hot image Windows servers but can’t hot image Linux servers. So what do you end up doing? Acronis!

Acronis True Image Echo Enterprise Server can hot image a server and then you can use the program to convert the image into a VMDK file which you can then import into an existing virtual machine. Then presto, you have a virtualized Linux server without ever having to down the existing older Linux server.

The only caveat is you have to install an Acronis agent on the Linux server to accomplish this. In order for the agent to install successfully you will require the kernel source to be installed. But then you can install the agent without requiring any reboots.

Happy imaging!

-RP

The value of taking the time to image servers…

Hello again! Today I wanted to talk a little bit about the value of imaging servers. What I mean by this is using a software product like Ghost or Acronis to take an exact image of the disk partitions so you have a nice “point in time” copy of a server.

You see there are times when you need to perform maintenance or patching to a server in order to fix something but you might be unsure of what the outcome will be. I have seen lots of small patches or upgrades bring down a server to the point where the technician needed to reinstall the operating system and restore data from backup. Normal backups are great, however they typically take a lot longer to restore which in the end causes more down time for the client. If you just take an image of a server then you can easily restore that image in a short amount of time if whatever you did causes an issue.

I have been on tech support calls with certain software vendors before where the technician on the line has told me to do certain things and that it shouldn’t affect anything. Then I make the recommended change and it instead blew up everything! If it wasn’t for the image I took beforehand I would have been faced with a long recovery time.

My personal favourite imaging software is Acronis True Image Echo Server for Windows. I’ve used it many times for imaging servers.

-RP