Migrate a server to a LXD container : call for ideas

[steven (Stevyn IronFeather Prothero)]

Hello,

I have a task of migrating an ubuntu server to a LXD container…

I was assuming I would : Build new server (LXD container), Install required software, Clone data…

Then I wondered, if instead, I could somehow create an “image” of the existing server and use that to start a new LXD container?

[steven (Stevyn IronFeather Prothero)]

UPDATE: Just discovered this tool: lxd-p2c

Will test it out now

HOWTO use lxd-p2c

I had great difficulty in getting lxd-p2c to work so I have written some notes on the process which will hopefully help someone get up and running faster. Feel free to improve these notes, put them on the wiki or whatever. LXD 3.x introduced lxd-p2c, a go program to ease the process of migrating an existing Linux server (most likely physical, but it could be another type of VM) into an LXD container. The LXD devs have decided not to bundle lxd-p2c in either their Ubuntu packages nor the LXD sna…

[Nick_Knutov]

lxd-p2c require some space on disk to create full archive of all disk. In case you do not have enough free space you can also use rsync like in my example - Fuidshift: migration from OpenVZ and some files owners (corrected) - it should work for migrationg from bare metal servers too.

[stgraber (Stéphane Graber)]

That’s not true, lxd-p2c doesn’t do any data copying on the source, it just sets up a mount namespace and then rsync everything across to the LXD server using the migration API.