This approach is useful for testing all sorts of changes in boot setup without actually risking a real reboot. Whether you're about to remove a hard disk, just want to test RAID with disk failures, have installed a new boot loader or just changed the configuration; this can help provide reassurance that your remote server will come back when you …
I administer (mostly through SEOSS) quite a few OpenVZ virtual machines and I recently wanted to create a clone of one onto a local system for some testing. Unfortunately I didn't have an OpenVZ machine locally, so decided I'd have a go at migrating the OpenVZ virtual to a local KVM instance. The process I went through is below. …
I started out with a virtual machine image that was 10GB in size. Within this are two partitions - the first a few hundred MB for /boot and the rest is a LVM partition. The LVM then contains swap, root and /home. In this particular case I needed to make /home bigger, I actually needed an extra couple of GB …