[ale] [EXTERNAL] Re: Clonezilla?

[Allen Beddingfield]

Yeah, I am not found of dealing with the Windows stuff either, but we manage the virtualization environment (Linux group), and Windows is about 60% of what is running on top of it....
The MS licensing isn't that big of a deal, as the Windows team has their stuff setup with an enterprise licensing scheme where the servers just phone home to an activation server - no freakout over hardware change, as long as the thing can "phone home".

We have a big enterprise environment, with thousands of VMs spread across multiple physical locations, and admins ranging from the ones of us who administer everything to people who know how to log in and do a few specific things with a subset of VMs, to cases where a few people have rights to just log in and power cycle a handful of VMs.
So, we need the big pretty enterprise admin portal with role based access, a company to call for support, etc...  that pretty much narrows us down to a small handful of vendors.  The KVM based options that could provide that were not workable.   Nutanix (doesn't work with existing FC storage), Proxmox (no good equivalent of DRS, and trying to manage 148 separate VLANs without just entering numerical ids of VLANs is an unmanageable mess), HP's new solution is a little too new, and they really want you to run that on their hardware (we are a Dell shop).  That pretty much leaves us with VMware, Microsoft, Vates, or going with something like Harvester or Openshift, and since we are only interested in traditional virtualization, that doesn't make much sense for us.  XCP-ng/XOA has some weird quirks, and causes some "why did they design this to work this way" head scratching moments, but it gets the job done - especially since the backup vendors have finally started adding integration for it.
Speaking of backup - it looks like we are going to be able to accomplish this with our backup software, so this may not be necessary...
Thanks.
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 DJPfulio--- via Ale <ale at ale.org>
Sent: Thursday, October 23, 2025 9:39 AM
To: Allen Beddingfield via Ale
Cc: DJPfulio at jdpfu.com
Subject: Re: [ale] [EXTERNAL] Re: Clonezilla?

On 10/23/25 09:25, Allen Beddingfield via Ale wrote:
> 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.

Windows?  Can't help.  I've moved a few MS-Windows machines between VM hosts, but their license checks always broke when changing hypervisor technologies so I had to reinstall.  OTOH, I have migrated MS-Windows running under KVM from Core2 Duo, to Core2Quad, to Core i5, to Ryzen 5000, but I've always used the qcow2 file format which makes it pretty easy.  Migrated a bunch of Linux VMs too, but those were all trivial in comparison.  The only issue I had was when the motherboard model of the prior VM changed and the license check failed.  That's when sysprep.exe is needed to unload all the drivers just before the physical migration to the new VM host (and newer faked motherboard hardware).

Used Xen from 2008-2011 in production. Same for VMware vSphere.  Best choice I ever made was to switch both to KVM-based hypervisors.  XCP-ng certainly provides management with the "cheese" factor. That's certain. Lots of pretty point-n-click stuff.  A few times a year, I had some VMs refuse to boot under Xen, so I'd have to restore to a snapshot made just prior to the updates and wait for OS changes to make to the client machines.  I was using paravirtual VMs for many Linux VMs, so some of that was self-inflicted.  The Windows VMs seemed to stutter in a way I could feel. Haven't seen that under KVM, ever, but it easily could have been an overtaxed Core2 Duo CPU struggling with the added demands of a HW-VM and Windows not being tuned for running under VMs at the time.  Windows always took more CPU than the same workload under a Linux VM.

I would give up on the idea of a noob Windows Admin doing these things.  Expect to train 2-3 people in the WinAdmin group on the stuff they need to know and let them help the others.  Let them schedule migration themselves. I'd get as far away from that as I could.

Sorry for babbling. Maybe 1 tiny part will be helpful.
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