Aaron Mehar’s CBS to VHD solution for Rackspace Cloud

Hey. So another one of my colleagues put together this really awesome article. Although I was aware this could be done, he’s done a really good job or putting together the procedures, of turning your CBS BFV (boot from (network) volume) disk into a VHD file.

Rackspace CBS disks works over iscsi and are presented via the network. The difference between instance store on the hypervisor, (utilized by cloud-server images), and the disk store on the CBS is that the CBS disk is not a VHD, but an disk presented over network via iscsi.

So, to take a VHD, or an equivalent cloud-server image snapshot, you need to image the disk manually, as well as convert it to VHD.

Taking an image of a volume is not possible, and would not be downloadable. However there are some workarounds that can be done.

*** Please NOTE ****
This is not supported, and we can not assist beyond these instructions. I could provide some clarity if required, however, my collegaues may not be able to help should I become unavailable.

If you just want the data, then you could just download the data to your local machine, however, if you a VHD to create a local VM, then the below instructions will achieve this.

Steps

Please take special care, making a mistake working with partitioner can wipe all your data

1. Shutdown the server
2. Clone the disk, by Starting a volume clone and start the server back up.
3. Attach the newly created clone to the server
4. create another new CBS volume of a slightly larger size (+5GB is OK)

Now that is done, we can image the disk. You will need to ensure you have the corrects disks. The second disk with data should be xvbd and the new CBS should be xvdc

Create partition and filesystem for xvdbc. Please see this guide: https://support.rackspace.com/how-to/prepare-your-cloud-block-storage-volume/

the image xvdb to xvdc

   dd if=/dev/xvdb of=/mnt/cbsvolume1/myimage.dd

The download the image to your workstation, and install VirtualBox, and run the below command

   VBoxManage convertfromraw myfile.dd myfile.vhd --format VHD

Please take special care, making a mistake working with partitioner can wipe all your data