3:38 p.m.
So as title states I am moving VMs from an old system of ours with
alot of issues to a new
4.4 HC Gluster envr although it seems I am running into what I have learnt is a 4.3 bug
of
some sort with exporting OVAs.
The latest release of 4.3 still contained a bug,
essentially a race condition which resulted in the OVA disk not being exported at all.
Unfortunately you can't tell from the file size, it's only when you look inside
the OVA that you'll see the disk image is actually empty.
I hand patched the (single line) fix to make OVA exports work, because they did not update
4.3 at that point any more.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1813028
Since the ability to migrate from one major release to another without such problems, I
since struggled with the oVirt team's motto "for the entire enterprise"
Some of my OVAs are showing large GB sizes although their actual size may be 20K so they
are showing no boot device as well, theres really no data there. Some OVAs are fine but
some are broken. So I was wondering if anyone has dealt with this and whats the best way
around this issue?
Yes, see above
I have no access remotely at the moment but when I get to them, I read somewhere its
better to just detach disks and download them to a HDD for example and build new VMs and
upload those disks and attach them instead this way?
You can actually export the
disks via the browser, but beware that sparse disks may wind up quite big. Unfortunately I
relied on VDO/thin to not have me think about disk sizes at all (nasty habit picked up
from VMware)...
Please do share if you have any better ways, usually I just Export OVA to an external
HDD,
remount to new ovirt and import OVA but seems a few of these VMs out of alot did not
succeed and I am running out of downtime window.
While Clonezilla wasn't so great for backup up complete oVirt hosts, which might have
VDO and Gluster bricks on them, it's turned out a great solution for backup up or
beaming VMs from one "farm" to another.
E.g. I've used it to move VMs from my oVirt 4.3 HCI cluster to my new XCP-NG 8.2 HCI
cluster or sometimes even to a temporary VMware VM without storing it externally: Just
create a target VM, have both ends move the Clonezilla ISO and start the transfer.
I believe backup domains were new in 4.4 so they only work for 4.4 -> 4.4 mobility, but
export domains, while deprecated, still work on both sides. So you can create and fill a
backup domain on 4.3, disconnect and reconnect it on 4.4 and import machines from there.
I believe I've faced some issues with VMs that were too old, or based on templates or
whatnot, so it's best to try the export/import fully before taking down and rebuilding
the 4.3, so the VMs in the backup domain can actually be recovered.
Generally any VM that is Q35 already on 4.3 seems to be less problematic on 4.4.
>
> Thanks a bunch, I have noticed repeated names helping me, I am very grateful for
your
> help.