HOWTO: P2V or bare-metal recovery of non-mirrored root ZFS disk

[kingneutron]

http://forums.pcbsd.org/showthread.p...ed=1#post97106

Hi - please forgive me, I don't mean to cross-post, but just wanted to let the general public know that I posted a HOWTO for PCBSD 9 on doing a physical-to-virtual (vmware) of a non-mirrored ZFS root disk, using tar and netcat. As a bonus, the P2V converts from 80GB mostly-empty root disk to ~20GB (shrink) and should also be of use if you ever need to do a bare-metal recovery

Feel free to post thoughts, optimizations, etc!

TL;DR:

o Boot into PCBSD 9 Live DVD environment in the VM/Restore PC

o Install PCBSD with the same ZFS mountpoints as the original box (can install to smaller disk if needed)

o Import your ZFS root and Delete almost everything (detailed commands with explanations)

o Restore from tar.gz backup file using Netcat

o Reboot and fix X / Nvidia and networking settings

/ Voila!