[Users] Importing VMs

[Keith Robertson]

Andrew,
Apologize for not seeing this post earlier.   Comments in-line.

On 02/03/2012 05:29 AM, Itamar Heim wrote:
> On 02/03/2012 11:27 AM, Andrew Dunlop wrote:
>> I am looking at how I might go about importing a mixture of existing
>> VMs into oVirt.
>> There doesn't appear to be any obvious way of doing this so I am
>> assuming it should be done manually.
>> If I where to create a raw disk image of my existing KVM virtual
>> machines how would I then go about importing this?
>> I can see on a node running a VM that there are two files in the
>> images folder associated with it. These appear to be the disk image
>> and a meta file containing configuration options for the VM.
>> Would the best way to go about this be to create a VM with the options
>> I require in oVirt and power cycle it so these files are created then
>> replace the disk image with my one, preserving the file name (which I
>> assume is the VMID).
So, if I understand your problem correctly, you have a bunch of KVM 
virtual machines that you would like to import into oVirt.  I think what 
you should use is virt-v2v (see section 3.3.2.4. in [1]).
- Example: virt-v2v -o rhev -os storage.example.com:/exportdomain 
--network rhevm vm-name

The new tool that I wrote, ovirt-image-uploader, facilitates the 
uploading and installing of VMs/Templates that are in OVF format.  What 
is an OVF format?  Well it is just a fancy term for a tar.gz archive 
with all of the meta-data and image(s) that constitute a VM or 
Template.  The ovirt-image-uploader will automagically unpack the OVF 
archive onto the export domain that you designate and will handle the 
changing of UUID's, Name, MACs, etc. so that there are no conflicts 
between the incoming image and those that might be in oVirt already.

I can give you instructions on the creation of a portable image in OVF 
format and and describe the layout therein.  Just let me know if this is 
what you want.

Cheers,
Keith




[1] 
http://docs.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Virtualization/3.0/html-single/V2V_Guide/index.html

>
> take a look at new and shiney utility called ovirt-image-uploader.
> cc-ing its author Keith