[PVE-User] Thoughts on Importing/Migrating VM's

[Lindsay Mathieson]

I've been testing importing our XenServer (6.2) Windows VM's to
ProxMox and have settled on a technique that works well for me

- Tried using the native VHD disk file, Apart from the painfull
process of identifying which one is correct, the qemu-img conversion
process gave me a lot of grief. Unbotable disks mainly.

- using XenCenter to export to ova format was extremely slow and the
xenmigrate.py script barfed on the extracted directory.

- Using VMWare convert worked well, though again very slow. Output to
a vmdk file which can then be converted using qemu-img. Annoyingly I
could not export using the converter directly to our NAS as it
insisted on breaking the vmdk into 2GB span files.

- Exporting using MS's disk2vhd program was very successful
(http://technet.microsoft.com/en-au/sysinternals/ee656415.aspx)
* Integrates with the Microsoft volume snapshot service
* No problem with exporting directly to a NAS share
* Much faster export then XenServer or VMWare converter

In the end process I developed that was the least painful and most
reliable for importing XenServer Windows VM'swas:

1. Create a Similar VM with ProxMox on a NFS share
2. Run disk2vhd on the live XenServer VM, targeting the ProxMox VM
folder on the NFS share
3. Shutdown the XenServer VM
3. Remote onto the proxmox machine using ssh
4. Switch to the VM directory (e.g /mnt/pve/LOB/images/101)
5. Delete or rename the existing px vm qcow disk file
6. use qemu-img to convert the VHD file from 2) to qcow format using
the same file name as in 5)
7. Start the VM and update drives, install spice tools, uninstall the
Citrix Guest tools etc.

I've done this with Windows 7, 2012 and 2012R2 VM's - had to modify
the 2012R2 cpu flags for it to boot, as mentioned elsewhere. But it
all works very smoothly. I'm sure this would work with any
Hypervisor's Windows VM, or real windows box.

Would the above be a worthwhile addition to the wiki?

-- 
Lindsay