AIX

I need help creating a Physical to Virtual server. I have successfully created 3 virtual machines on my VIO server. Now I want to move my physical aix 6.1 server to a virtual machine. I was able to backup/restore the rootvg successfully, but I am having so much trouble with my 20GB vg01 volume group. I followed the documentation for IBM, but it does not work very well because of the size of the image. I have tried mkcd which created 17 cd images then it was restoring on the newly created vm until image 10 and then it said the image is corrupt and aborted. I tried the savevg but then the image was to large to ftp over to any of the directories on the vio server. Does anybody know the correct procedure for doing physical to virtual of the user data volume group?

You can use NIM server to backup the OS ROOTVG and restore it on the virtual physical server. You just have to install the filesets of NIM Server on any existing server...

Try this and let us know.

Can you be more specific about which documentation you followed, as I would expect you to move data to the target LPAR not the VIO server.

I've done this several ways: NFS export the user volume filesystems and then copy them across on the virtual server to a new volume group.

If you have a good backup, and vg01 is on a SAN LUN. Deallocate the LUN from the physical server and allocate it via the VIO to the lpar and then import the vg again.

If I have understood you correctly , you have successfully build the new server using the mksysb of your physical server and now facing the challenges in moving the data from VG01 on the new server . Don't you have TSM/Netbackup setup in your environment , you can simply backup and restore the VG01's filesystems from your physical machine and get it restored on the new LPAR ( of course you need to get the new LPAR registerd with TSM/Netbackup ) . OR as Ross suggested , if the data is on SAN disks , export the volume group , map the luns ( thru VIO ) server on new LPAR and import the vg . But if VG is created on internal disks , then NFS export the VG01's filesystem and mount them on new server and run copy over the data for each filesystem into respective new filesystems in new LPAR.

Hope it help you

Thank you for all of your suggestions. The documentation is the Redbook - PowerVM Migration from Physical to Virtual Storage chapter 3 and 4.

Hello raemccarthy

You can do the same procedure with dvd disc and you save time. I do this once and work fine.

If you want the procedure I give it to you. Just I dont know if we can put the email or something. I only have to translate because its in spanish.

Let me know if this helps.

I forgot the fast path is smitty mkdvd