For those running Xen on servers with no back-end SAN, the following instructions detail the steps necessary to move an LVM-based virtual machine to a new physical host. There may be more elegant ways to achieve this, but this is what worked for me.

Environment
Ok, so let’s set the scene:

  • vmhost is a RHEL 5 server running several virtual machines using the Xen virtualization technology. Each virtual machine is allocated a 60 GB logical volume within an LVM volume group. One of these virtual machines, “win2k3vm”, needs to be moved to a new server.
  • new-vmhost is almost identical to vmhost, but has updated hardware and more memory. This is the server that “win2k3vm” will be moved to.

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