I have successfully imported OVA files which came from VirtualBox before, something
I'd consider the slightly greater hurdle.
Exporting a VM to an OVA file and then importing it on another platform can obviously
create compatibility issues, but oVirt <-> oVirt exports and imports with the same
(or similar) release should obviously just work, right?
Sadly, that doesn't seem to be the case.
I've just exported a Linux VM, a Univention domain controller using Debian 9 to an OVA
and tried importing it on another farm.
The process finished without an error, but the machine wouldn't boot.
Closer inspection reveals that the exported OVA file is about 100GB in size, which
corresponds to the size of the thinly allocated primary disk, but actually contains only
28kb of data (the XML header), while the disk is all zeros ('strings
<machine-name>.ova')
Another VM I had exported a week ago contains about 2.3GB of data, but that machine also
doesn't boot. When I attach its disk to another VM as a secondary, the file system
seems to contain bogus data, most directories are unreadable and an fsck goes on for
minutes.
Export domains are deprecated but when I export the original and runnable VM there, I get
23GB, which corresponds to what the VM is actually using. Infortunately that doesn't
give me the mobility for the VM that I desire, especially since I cannot have a shared
export/import domain between farms. And then I really might want to use a different
hypervisor for a VM that was developed on oVirt, e.g. to put on a laptop.
I've been trying to find clues as to what's going on, but generally the OVA
exports don't seem to be logged in any obvious place and even the imports on seem to
get logged, when the OVAs need to be converted from a foreign format such as VirtualBox
where the entire, seemingly rather complex process, is logged in
/var/log/vdsm/import/<something>
Am I the only one trying to use OVA export/import or is that part of standard Q&A
testing?
Show replies by date