If you can read this, then I managed to not bungle the migration from physical hardware to a virtual machine.

The plan was to dump the database and set up the blog on a fresh install of Ubuntu server in a VM.  Instead, I used a utility called fsarchiver, which did a great job of backing up my primary partition on the physical box, and dumped onto a smaller partition on the VM.  Much less work!

Once the data was restored, I had to fix grub so it would boot from the virtual drive, and straighten out some networking issues outside of the VM environment.

The old box is powered down!