Linode disk image to VirtualBox?
I'd like to replicate our running application (that's distributed over 5 linodes) on local dev machines to work on issues that arise from the multi-server setup.
My idea is to download disk images of the Linodes and convert them to VirtualBox instances. Does that make sense? How to convert them?
Thanks!
Karim
10 Replies
James
You can adapt the image to make it work. It's a pain in the ass. My preferred trick is to reduce a system to a set of installed software and configuration atop a base system. Something like devstructure's blueprint can do this for an existing system, or you can build this from the ground up using puppet, chef, or some other tool.
dpkg –get-selections > packages.txt
Then on my local system I use this to sync the packages up manually:
sudo dpkg --set-selections < packages.txt
sudo apt-get dselect-upgrade
This is an old article but it does contain some helpful responses from the readers:
One last thought, you might want to consider chroot, I'm not a pro (only used it once) at using it but it might let you image your server, copy it locally then access it in a chroot without the booting mess … maybe (not totally sure).
@arttus:
I've been wanting to do a similar setups to this, i just recently learned of this new system
http://vagrantup.com/
Doesn't look good for multi-core programming to me.
James
@zunzun:
@arttus:I've been wanting to do a similar setups to this, i just recently learned of this new system
http://vagrantup.com/ Doesn't look good for multi-core programming to me.
James
Why not? There doesn't seem to be anything preventing you from creating multi-core VMs with it?
@Guspaz:
Why not? There doesn't seem to be anything preventing you from creating multi-core VMs with it?
Ah, but deployment is a different thing altogether - if the remote server does not allow multi-core VMs you cannot deploy one. I do not see this discussed, nor do they mention the number of CPUs available or pricing per additional core. That would indeed be something to crow about, and they do not do so.
James
@Guspaz:
They're not selling anything.
Oh. I thought they also hosted. My bad - consider me appropriately chastised. Good call.
James