Today I had a customer that needed me to move over his Virtual Machine (Virtual Private Server) from the Rack Space Cloud to one of our OpenVZ servers on Beyond Hosting. While in theory this seemed pretty easy, it became all to clear that It wouldn’t be. First, rack spaces cloud uses a strange configuration of Xen Para Virtualization, and for whatever reason their configuration does not easily convert to OpenVZ using the standard methods.
Upon importing, the tty configurations are broken and you must repair this before you can serial console into the container or ssh it. After your fix tty you will need to reconfigure the networking configuration for venet0:0 with the OpenVZ commands. In my case the /dev devices were correctly configured and I did not need to do any further editing for the container to work correctly.
However if you are importing a physical system or Xen HVM guest you will need to follow this guide provided by OpenVZ. OpenVZ Convert OS to Container If you only have a few applications installed and minimal configuration it is easier to SCP over the configs along with home directory’s. Create the respective users and chown all the home dir’s back to those users. Besides, the more you do it the better you will be at using your OS!
Earlier I mentioned that the customer was having me migrate from a Rack Space Cloud VPS, I just want to note that Rack Space has always been a highly recommended solid and reputable company. While they still are, the shear size they have grown to has slightly tarnished their products quality. The reason for the migration was simply cost for performance, he did not feel that the performance was worth what he was paying.