[ovirt-users] Import from OVA with encrypted root

[Chris Adams]

Once upon a time, Tomáš Golembiovský <tgolembi at redhat.com> said:
> unfortunately virt-v2v cannot import VMs with encrypted root file
> system. Moreover import of Debian/Ubuntu/Mint guests is not yet
> supported by oVirt either. For that you would need development version
> of virt-v2v. There are no packages for RHEL/CentOS yet. There should be
> packages in Fedora rawhide if you feel brave enough to setup such host
> in oVirt (Note: I'm not suggesting you or anyone should do that).

So, I went the manual route.  I made a new VM of appropriate size, with
a non-thin-provisioned IDE disk, and booted it from a rescue CD.  I
extracted the vmdk from the ova file, used qemu-img to convert it to
raw, and used netcat to dump it over the network into the VM and onto
the disk.

That of course doesn't do any of the things that should be done to
"convert" a VM, but (at least in this case), it appears to have worked
"good enough" (the VM boots and gets on the network).

Still amused that somebody thinks distributing an image with encrypted
filesystems, and the key for that encryption in the initrd, does
anything to "secure" their image.  Sigh...
-- 
Chris Adams <cma at cmadams.net>