Mirroring live system - what are the options

What are my options to mirror a running system (without taking it down) to have an as close as possible copy for use as a XEN guest?

Now I'm planning to install the same version of OS as domU and simply rsync everything down to it from the live system. Not sure about /boot | kernel stuff though, any problems syncing these?

Also, can I set a remote "nice" level for rsync, cap bandwidth - to avoid putting stress on the live server?

From serverfault Karolis T.

• rsync has a --bwlimit option to limit bandwidth.

  From Rory McCann

• Hi,

  "DRBD® refers to block devices designed as a building block to form high availability (HA) clusters. This is done by mirroring a whole block device via an assigned network. DRBD can be understood as network based raid-1."

  I use drbd in my XEN Cluster.

  HINT2: LVM2 is perfect addition

  P.S. Please excuse my bad english...

  Karolis T. : Hi, thanks for your suggestions, though they're not related to the question - I need a use-one-time way of mirroring a running server to a remote machine in order to make a domU out of it.

  Yordan : old server# rsync --verbose --progress --stats --recursive --times --perms --links --owner --group --hard-links --devices --exclude "/proc" --exclude "/sys" --exclude "/backups" /* IP.IP.IP.IP:/mount/point This work for me P.S. I use HVM and not custom kernel

  Karolis T. : Thanks, guess I'll have to use rsync.
  From Yordan