This will be old hat to you experienced Xen users, but I have mostly left my engineers to look after our xen/cloud hosting, and have not had so much real exposure to Xen myself. I have however been looking after two oldish Xen hosts, “oslo” and “airbus”, together running a collection miscellaneous test & infrastructure machines. The hardware is ancient, a couple of HP Proliant DL380 G4s, but those who know this hardware will also know they just won’t die. However, we have been putting more and more load on them, and lately, after migrating off ISDN, we wanted to virtualise our Asterisk box, but simply did not have the room.

This weekend I grabbed another elderly box, an HP Proliant DL380 G5 with 32Gb and dual quad cores. Plenty for our infrastructure needs. I got it up and running openSUSE Leap15 in no time, then I started contemplating what to move first.
The answer was obvious – the test systems, “test150” and “test422”. I started with test150, shut it down, created the logical volume on “mirage”, the new host. Copied over the logical volume from “oslo” with

dd bs=1048576 if=/dev/xenspace/test150 | ssh mirage "dd of=/dev/xenspace/test150".

I copied the config over, then cranked it up “xl create /srv/xen/auto/test150”. Job done.

I am just pleasantly surprised how smooth and easy it all went. Chapeau Xen!

Completing the migration of the remaining machines, 9 or 10 of them, from “oslo” and “airbus” to “mirage” should be done tomorrow. That’ll leave us plenty of extra capacity for the future as well as reduce power consumption, which is always good.