[ovirt-users] Export VM to ova or ovf format

[Brett Holcomb]

Thanks.  I had hoped the ova/ovf spec was good enough that it worked 
both ways.  I was originally running ESXi 6 on this hardware and then 
moved to oVirt 3.6.  I did that by moving all the ESXi stuff to VMware 
Workstation and running it there.  Once oVirt replaced ESXi I then 
exported from workstation and imported successfully to oVirt so it 
worked that way but VMware has no real interest in making other stuff 
importable to them.

I did find out I can run ESXi in a VMware Workstation instance so if 
push comes to shove I can do that and do the VMware P2V to ESXi and then to
Workstation.

On 06/02/2017 07:42 AM, Tomáš Golembiovský wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Wed, 31 May 2017 18:14:53 -0400
> Brett Holcomb <biholcomb at l1049h.com> wrote:
>
>> Is there anyway to export a oVirt VM to an ova or ovf format. Right
>> click export seems to be intended to transfer between oVirt storage
>> domains. There is a project to setup a gui to do this but it's still in
>> the planning stage.
> Yes, this is still work in progress. But it is intended only to simplify
> transfer of VMs between oVirt instances. It is not guaranteed that the OVA
> will work in VMware -- unless VMware produces a conversion tool or
> something.
>
>> I've found various references that basically export
>> it to an export domain and then you strip the disk or disks from it,
> Yes that is probably the only way right now. There should be also an OVF
> in the export domain -- inside master/vms directory. You can try to
> fix the paths to disks and pack it all together to produce an OVA.
>
> But than again, it's questionable whether such OVA will be importable to
> VMware.
>
> The OVF specification is too vague and too broad. It does not guarantee
> interoperability between various platforms.
>
>
>> create a VMware workstation VM, and then point it at the new disks you
>> have.  VMware's P2V converter is useless because it only converts Linux
>> machines to an ESXi server which I don't have and once you do that it's
>> another conversion to VMware Workstation.  Guess nobody wants to run
>> Linux on VMware workstation according to VMware.  I'm trying to get some
>> of my critical servers over to VMware Workstation on my Windows Physical
>> box so when I upgrade oVirt I still have my basic network.  I'm running
>> a self-hosted Engine setup with only one Physical server at the moment.
>>
>> Thanks.
>>
>>
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>