Migrating www.differentpla.net to a virtual machine, part 2

26 Feb 2013 06:12

Yesterday, I said that I’d be migrating my website to a virtual machine; originally, I’d planned to mess around with Linux Live CDs.

However, while creating the virtual machine in Hyper-V, I discovered that it (at least in Windows 2012) has the ability to create a VHDX from a physical disk. And, fortunately, I had a test PC, on which I’d installed Windows 2012 Server, which had the case open…

So: I extracted the hard disk from the existing Linux box, plugged it into the test PC and told Hyper-V to clone the disk. A couple of hours later, I had a .VHDX file containing an image of my Linux web server.

Firing it up, however, revealed two problems:

  1. No network connectivity.
  2. Some things are really slow. In particular, console output is basically unusable.

These are both caused by the same thing: no integration components are loaded.

I found this page, which explains how to add the relevant modules to Ubuntu 10.04. Unfortunately, it didn’t work for me: I got a kernel panic when I ran insmod hv_netvsc.ko. While this page isn’t about Ubuntu, it would appear that I’m having the same problem.

So, I used a “Legacy Network Adapter” instead. It wasn’t eth0, so I had to figure that out from:

cat /proc/net/dev

…which told me that the adapter was called eth1. At this point, I could edit the /etc/network/interfaces to configure the network adapter, and then run ifup eth1 to bring up the network.

Success!

And now to upgrade to a more-recent version of Ubuntu (from Lucid Lynx to Precise Pangolin), so that I can get integration components that don’t panic the kernel…