Importing KVM guests to oVirt or RHEV

One of the tools I maintain is virt-v2v. It’s a program to import guests from foreign hypervisors like VMware and Xen, to KVM. It only does conversions to KVM, not the other way. And a feature I intentionally removed in RHEL 7 was importing KVM → KVM.

Why would you want to “import” KVM → KVM? Well, no reason actually. In fact it’s one of those really bad ideas for V2V. However it used to have a useful purpose: oVirt/RHEV can’t import a plain disk image, but virt-v2v knows how to import things to oVirt, so people used virt-v2v as backdoor for this missing feature.

Removing this virt-v2v feature has caused a lot of moaning, but I’m adamant it’s a very bad idea to use virt-v2v as a way to import disk images. Virt-v2v does all sorts of complex filesystem and Windows Registry manipulations, which you don’t want and don’t need if your guest already runs on KVM. Worst case, you could even end up breaking your guest.

However I have now written a replacement script that does the job: http://git.annexia.org/?p=import-to-ovirt.git

If your guest is a disk image that already runs on KVM, then you can use this script to import the guest. You’ll need to clone the git repo, read the README file, and then read the tool’s man page. It’s pretty straightforward.

There are a few shortcomings with this script to be aware of:

1. The guest must have virtio drivers installed already, and must be able to boot off virtio-blk (default) or virtio-scsi. For virtio-scsi, you’ll need to flip the checkbox in the ‘Advanced’ section of the guest parameters in the oVirt UI.
2. It should be possible to import guests that don’t have virtio drivers installed, but can use IDE. This is a missing feature (patches welcome).
3. No network card is added to the guest, so it probably won’t have network when it boots. It should be possible to add a network card through the UI, but really this is something that needs to be fixed in the script (patches welcome).
4. It doesn’t handle all the random packaging formats that guests come in, like OVA. You’ll have to extract these first and import just the disk image.
5. It’s not in any way supported or endorsed by Red Hat.

New in libguestfs 1.27.34 – virt-v2v and virt-p2v

There haven’t been too many updates around here for a while, and that’s for a very good reason: I’ve been “heads down” writing the new versions of virt-v2v and virt-p2v, our tools for converting VMware and Xen virtual machines, or physical machines, to run on KVM.

The new virt-v2v [manual page] can slurp in a guest from a local disk image, local Xen, VMware vCenter, or (soon) an OVA file — convert it to run on KVM — and write it out to RHEV-M, OpenStack Glance, local libvirt or as a plain disk image.

It’s easy to use too. Unlike the old virt-v2v there are no hairy configuration files to edit or complicated preparations. You simply do:

$ virt-v2v -i disk xen_disk.img -o local -os /tmp

That command (which doesn’t need root, naturally) takes the Xen disk image, which could be any supported Windows or Enterprise Linux distro, converts it to run on KVM (eg. installing virtio drivers, adjusting dozens of configuration files), and writes it out to /tmp.

To connect to a VMware vCenter server, change the -i options to:

$ virt-v2v -ic vpx://vcenter/Datacenter/esxi "esx guest name" [-o ...]

To output the converted disk image to OpenStack glance, change the -o options to:

$ virt-v2v [-i ...] -o glance [-on glance_image_name]

Coming up: The new technology we’ve used to make virt-v2v much faster.

More news on open sourcing …

I should say first that Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager (RHEV-M) is the name of Red Hat’s supported product.

The open source project behind it is going to be called (no surprises …) oVirt.

The big launch is going to be at the beginning of November. Source code available at the same time. You can read the announcement here (PDF).