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patanassov
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

Better experience with Linux P2V

Hello all,

As you know, Converter 6.0 is now GA. It now officially supports CentOS (v. 6 and 7). However there is more than that which is not in the docs.

As you probably also know, the tricky part in Linux P2V is reconfiguration. Which means the cloning itself would run successfully for virtually any Linux distro, but reconfiguration has specifics that vary across distros and versions, mostly (but not only) related to creating the initial ramfs.

Converter detects the source distro and version and uses this information to setup the appropriate reconfigurators. If it does not recognize it, it defaults to a predefined behavior and hopes for the best. For example, CentOS is so similar to RHEL, that if reconfiguration is done the RHEL way, that would be enough. However, Converter versions prior to 6.0 were not able to do it because of this logic.

In Converter 6.0 we have extended this logic - it recognizes a few other distros and uses the reconfiguration of the supported 'relative' distro. This is an approximation, the real logic is more complex. E.g dracut is becoming a de facto standard as a tool for creating the initial ramfs; Converter uses that, and if the source supports dracut, it uses it to create the initrams image regardless of the distro.

But basically these are:

  • Fedora, Oracle Linux, and Asianux are treated as RHEL (CentOS too, obviously)
  • Debian is treated as Ubuntu

Disclaimer: Only distros and versions mentioned in the User's Guide and Release Notes are officially supported!

All others have passed very limited testing (i.e. don't be surprised if anything doesn't work as expected). This post is aimed to improve the experience in the gray area of "this is not supported but sometimes it may work".

Thank you for your attention and best regards,

Plamen

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