SEMI-OT: Cloning OEL4 and Oracle 10gR2 to VMWare

I have a small standalone OEL4 box running a 10.2.0.3 Grid Control OMS with a 10.2.0.3 Repository DB. I need to migrate this to Grid Control 10.2.0.5 for some plugin work.

Since I have no development box to test the migration, I thought a VM would work. I tried Sun's VirtualBox, but the 1.5GB RAM limit on a 32-bit VM was too restrictive, so I'm attempting VMWare Player 3.0.0 now.

My sticking point is how to get the server from the physical box to the VM. Normally, I'd tar/gzip the whole drive (30GB used) to a drive, boot off a USB or CD and restore the tarball to the new box's HDD. But VMWare Player doesn't seem to have a bootpath option for doing this for a particular VM.

I was also thinking that I should be able to copy non-OS directories from Production over to the VM, since I have never upgraded it's original OEL4 install (i.e. no subscription to up2date services). But I'd also have to pull several files from /etc /usr/local/bin and possibly others to get new users, passwords, configs, etc. and I'm thinking that this method could be fraught with problems of missed files.

Thoughts? Anyone does this before? Pointers?

TIA!
Rich

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