On Fri, Jan 17, 2014 at 05:06:13PM +0100, Sander Grendelman wrote:
On Fri, Jan 17, 2014 at 4:19 PM, Itamar Heim <iheim(a)redhat.com>
wrote:
> I see a lot of threads about v2v pains (mostly from ESX?)
>
> I'm interested to see if we can make this simpler/easier.
hear hear!
>
> if you have experience with this, please describe the steps you are using
> (also the source platform),
Sources:
- Existing KVM (virt-manager/libvirt) platform
- ESX
- ova/ovf templates from several sources
Methods:
- KVM:
virt-v2v with libvirtxml option, works reasonably well, most issues
are with windows guests where virt-v2v needs libguestfs-winsupport and
virtio-win (RHEL only)
- ESX:
virt-v2v which works reasonably well _if_ the right packages
(libguestfs-winsupport virtio-win) are installed.
virt-v2v can be used directly from ESX/ESX host (configure .netrc
first) but this is quite slow
another option is to export the VM as an OVA and then import it with virt-v2v
- ova/ovf templates:
hit and miss with virt-v2v, especially if they contain something
that is not a regular windows/linux guest.
Another option is to do a direct copy of the disks on a pre-created
VM, clumsy.
> and how you would like to see this make simpler
> (I'm assuming that would start from somewhere in the webadmin probably).
Webadmin would be nice, but better behaviour from existing tools would be
a nice start too.
For example: the flow with virt-v2v is
1) Analyze source, look for disks
2) Convert/copy disks to ovirt export domain
3) Try to add virtio stuff to the copied disks on the export domain
If step 3 fails ( which happens a LOT), the copied disks are removed.
This is very frustrating if you just waited a couple of hours for a large
VM (e.g. 200GB) to be copied :(
Some kind of graceful abort/resume would be VERY welcome.
The above basically come down to the fact that currently virt-v2v does
the copy first and the v2v step second. It was my understanding
[Matt?] that guestconv is supposed to do the v2v step first followed
by the copy, which should solve all of that.
Another issue with virt-v2v is that it _always_ tries to add virtio
drivers. I have a virtual appliance that contains some kind of
proprietary embedded OS: adding drivers will always fail, give me
some option to override that and configure simple ide / e1000
hardware for the VM
I suspect in this case what you really should be doing is just copying
the source disk image, without using virt-v2v at all.
Rich.
--
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat
http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
libguestfs lets you edit virtual machines. Supports shell scripting,
bindings from many languages.
http://libguestfs.org