Hello Level1Tech forms! So I've been a big fan of the Linux channel and learned a lot from it. I recently got a new position where I work in the science department. So we have a ton of Linux machines and we have 3 of them that we're worried about it failing and having to reinstall everything. I'm also concerned about installing new software for them and running into an issue where the software doesn't work.
What I'm wondering is if its possible for me to take a snapshot of the current computers and load them into a VM to do testing before installing all the software? If so, what are some of the common safe methods to go about it without interrupting the up time of the machine?
optimally clonezilla, else sometimes a DD image of the harddrives can be ported to other systems with no problems, sometimes the filesystem will complain about not being shutdown properly yada yada dirty but etc. most of the hardware you're using should be somewhat compatible, unless you're upgrading the HW platform from a pentium 4 to a bleeding edge 40 cores xeon cpu, 2tb ram,and all that expensive jazz. GPU may be a problem though if you port a system, buuut aslong as you stay somewhat close to the original hardware the caveats should be small and somewhat easy to solve.
You may be able to use VMware converter to make the machine into a VM while live.
As far as complete images with no downtime, I'm not aware of anything for Linux with this functionality when it comes to backup solutions. That said, you can technically just tar -czf root.tar.xz / and uncompress it on the new machine, install grub, tweak fstab and network config and be happy.
On Linux, it won't care as long as you're running binaries of the same architecture.