[Users] Importing VMs

[Andrew Dunlop]

On 3 February 2012 13:41, Keith Robertson <kroberts at redhat.com> wrote:
> 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 portableusers at ovirt.org, Itamar Heim <iheim at redhat.com> 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
>
>

I have managed to get my existing KVM onto my node by converting it
from qcow to raw (using qemu-img convert) then I created a libxml file
from the arguements I have been using to start the VM with KVM. I then
used virt-v2v to do the conversion for oVirt and this put everything
in the correct places in the nfs export storage on my node. This then
appears without any problems in the VM Import tab for my Export
storage. I then restored this which was successful.
However when I run my VM I get past the GRUB OS selection screen then I get:
Loading Linux ...
Loading Inital ramdisk ...
unaligned pointer 0x######
Aborted.

Any idea why this might be? Could it be a sparce problem? It must be
something to do with how oVIrt is running the VM as I have checked
that I can still run my VM using KVM from the nfs_export directory.
Does oVirt do something strange to the file system? Could it be an IDE
/ VirtIO problem?