2011/2/28 Márcio Luciano Donada <[email protected]> > Hi People > Physically I'm running a debian server 4 for the e-mail, but I'm having > problems to use the tool to perform VM virtualization. I wonder if there > is another way to virtualize this machine, do some kind of backup so you can > import it in vmware. Does anyone have any tips that might help? > > > > boot from a cd, dd to a network drive, make the vmdk the same size as the physical, boot the vm with a live cd, dd the image from the network to the vm's hdd. reboot. should work just fine. if the mac address is physically defined (don't think debian does this like rh does) you might have some network issues. also, don't bring the physical up while you're doing this or you'll be missing messages on the spool.
the other thing that might work is to take it down to single user mode, reconfigure your network, boot the virtual into the live cd, and copy the contents over. then run grub-install and reboot (if you've got partitions, make sure you mount them as appropriate on the virtual and turn on the boot flag). this is a mail server, so you'll probably also have to do some minor reconfig on your network as well.
