[ale] [EXTERNAL] Re: Clonezilla?

[Allen Beddingfield]

Maybe I should have been more specific about what I'm doing.
We are migrating between virtualization environments - fleeing VMware, like most.  The old environment is vSphere 8.x, and the new is XCP-ng and Xen Orchestra.
Migrating from VMware is dead simple.  Getting back to VMware is a manual process (download the vhd file, use Starwinds or some other tool to convert it to vmdk, copy the vmdk up to the VMware datastore, manually create a VM, attach that to it).
I was trying to find a "migrate across the network" solution to go from XCP-ng to VMware that an entry level Windows sysadmin could do, without having to have ssh and sftp access to the infrastructure on both sides, or to understand how that works.
No real use case for it yet - just anticipating that we may have something problematic that has to come back to the old environment.  I've seen youtube videos of people doing the same thing, but they seem to only have disks with one partition.  It seems that when you have multiple, it switches to one port per partition, and the client at the destination can't figure out which ports to try to connect on.
Allen B.

--
Allen Beddingfield
Systems Engineer
Office of Information Technology
The University of Alabama
Office 205-348-2251
allen at ua.edu


________________________________________
From: Ale <ale-bounces at ale.org> on behalf of Alex Carver via Ale <ale at ale.org>
Sent: Wednesday, October 22, 2025 11:30 PM
To: ale at ale.org
Cc: Alex Carver
Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: [ale] Clonezilla?

Do you really need Clonezilla for cloning a VM? Most VMs are stored in
just a few files so you really only need to transfer those instead of
trying to clone the VM from inside itself while running.

At least that's the case with VirtualBox that I use on some work
computers. There's a .vbox file (machine definition file, the VM
settings) and a .vdi file (virtual disk image) that contains all the
data. I just copy those two files to another machine then open
VirtualBox on that machine, point to the files, and I'm up and running.

As for your transfer issue, make sure that you are able to cross from
one machine to the other just in case a control port is not making it
across to provide appropriate discovery information for the session.

On 2025-10-22 21:03, Allen Beddingfield via Ale wrote:
> Believe it or not, I've never actually used Clonezilla - so this is my first go.  I'm assuming we've probably got some here with experience using it.
> Essentially, I'm just trying to do a basic clone of one VM to another across the network - with them both being on the same subnet/no firewall in between..
>
> Here is what I'm trying, and what is happening:
>
> I boot the source VM, select "remote-source Enter source mode of remote device cloning",
> then I select "Beginner" for the mode, then "disk_to_remote_disk", then dhcp,
> sync the time to ntp, then select the desk, skip fsck, select "use the partition table
> from the source disk", select "no" on the option to copy the Clonezilla logs,
> then select "choose" for the action after completion.
>
> It then proceeds to listen on a different port for each partition on the disk:
> ports 9015,9021,9027, and 9033
>
> On the destination server, I select "remote-dest Enter destination mode of remote device cloning",
> I go through the dhcp setup, and give it the ip address of the source server on
> the same subnet, the I select "restoredisk Restore a disk image (restore entire hard disk),
> I select the local disk, and go through the verification that I want to overwrite it.
>
> It then starts two "nc" commands to the ip of the source, but on ports 9003 and 9009.
> There is nothing listening on those ports, as the source is listening on 9015,9021, 9027, and 9033.
>
> What am I doing wrong?  I assume something is supposed to tell the destination
> what ports to try?  I don't have any option to specify the ports to attempt the
> restore from on the destination side.
>
> Thanks.
> Allen B.
>
>
>
>
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