How can I migrate physical servers into your cloud?

If you have physical servers that you would like to migrate into our cloud, you have two options.

Method 1: Image the drive then upload the image via our API

You can image the hard disk drive for the server you are wishing to migrate thereby creating a raw .iso image which you can then upload directly into your account with CloudSigma.

You will find detailed upload method instructions in this section of our API documentation.

Uploading via our API is our recommended method.

Method 2: Image the disk by booting from a Linux live CD

• Firstly you will need to create a new server in your account with a blank hard drive at least as big as the drive you wish to migrate and boot from a Linux LiveCD.
• Make sure an SSH server is running your on new cloud server so you can SSH to it.
• Make sure the LiveCD is in ide:0:0 and your blank hard drive is in ide:0:1.
• For the purposes of this example, we will describe the destination IP address as xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx.
• On the server you wish to take an image of to migrate to our cloud, firstly boot from the live CD, open a terminal then use the following command:

dd if=/dev/sda | gzip -c | ssh root@xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx ‘gzip -d’ | dd of=/dev/hdb

• Please change root for the superuser account on your cloud server and xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx for the correct IP address of your cloud server.
• This method will zip up the whole drive image in raw format then transfer it via SSH to the cloud server.
• Please note that uploading a large drive this way can take a very long time depending on your internet connectivity.