Executing a Scan of the Source System

The first step in migrating your system is running a scan of the target system. This identifies the meta-data of every file and package that makes up the running workload.

You must have root access on the target system in order to complete the scan, as you will need to copy and run a binary file on the target system.

Warning

UForge AppCenter does not support multi-kernels. When scanning a machine with more than one kernel, only the kernel running will be scanned and imported.

When you run a scan of a system, UForge AppCenter will differentiate between “known” data (OS packages and files that are already part of UForge AppCenter repository) and files that are “unknown”. UForge AppCenter does not support more than 10 Gb of compressed “unknown” data.

Warning

Any pre-install or post-install scripts on the system you are about to scan should only use ascii character set. Otherwise UForge AppCenter will return a scan error: DB Error invalid characters.

Recommendations pre-scan:

  • Pre-install or post-install scripts on the system you are about to scan should only use ascii character set
  • Custom packages on the live system to be scanned should not contain references to package dependencies as relative path. They should be expressed as absolute paths.
  • If custom packages are installed using --nodeps flag, the scan process will not detect these packages. When carrying out white box migration, UForge AppCenter will check for these dependencies. If they are custom packages that are not on the live system, the generation will fail. Therefore, it is recommended to provide a custom repository with all the necessary custom packages. Otherwise, they can be added after the scan to the appliance template using the My software.

Scanning a Linux Machine

To carry out a scan, go to the Migration tab:

  1. Click on scan in the top right.
  2. Enter a name for the scan of the target system you want to migrate.
  3. Select Linux from the drop-down menu.
  4. If you want to exclude certain directories or files from the scan then click add and enter the directory path or full pathname of the file.
../../_images/migration-create-scan.jpg
  1. Click Next. Follow the instructions on the UForge AppCenter GUI.
  2. Download binary locally by clicking Download.
  3. Copy the binary on the target environment you want to migrate.
  4. Open a terminal window and login to the target environment.
  5. Run the scan command on the running target environment to start a deep scan of the system you want to migrate.

By default the scan data will be saved in /tmp. You can modify the directory where the data will be saved using the -t option in order to ensure that there is enough space to save the scan data. The binary runs to identify the packages, files and custom files on the system.

  1. A report is sent to UForge AppCenter which can be used for migration. To view the progress, go back to the Migration tab and click ok.

Note

The duration of the scan depends on: the power of the machine in the target environment, the complexity of the target environment OS (number of packages installed), the network bandwidth between the target environment and UForge. Scans of typical simple target environments can last about 5 to 15 minutes. In the case of larger and more complex target environments, together with poorer bandwidth, one can experience durations up to one hour.

Note

Image generation will fail when migrating if the source server has the same LVM volume group name as the UForge server’s one. It will fail also if the volume group name set in the Partitioning Table is the same as the name of LVM volume group in UForge server.

Scanning a Windows Machine

To carry out a scan, go to the Migration tab:

  1. Click on scan in the top right.

  2. Enter a name for the scan of the target system you want to migrate.

  3. Select Windows from the drop-down menu and click next.

  4. Select the method you want to use: if you want to scan using an exe that will launch a graphical interface, or by downloading a zip file and launching it through command-line.

    • If you are using exe the pop up will indicate the partition being scanned and time left
    • If you choose to download the zip then you will have to launch the command as indicated.
../../_images/migration-scan-windows.jpg
  1. If you want to exclude certain directories or files from the scan then click add and enter the directory path or full pathname of the file.
../../_images/migration-windows-download.jpg
  1. Optionally you can select Use local storage. This means that the scan will be not be done in streaming but in 2 phases. First the data will be stored on a temporary storage drive during the scan process. This temporary storage can be a local directory or a virtual space on the network. It must be at least half the size of the machine you want to scan.

If you are using local storage you will have to launch a script at the end to upload the archive to UForge AppCenter later.