Speedup vm migration from xen to pve

[Alessandro 123]

Let's assume a 300gb VM on XenServer
Migrating that to pve needs a convertion via xenmigrate

So:

1. Export the VM to an xva file
2. Extract the xva file
3. Convert the disk image with xenmigrate
4. Upload the disk image to PVE

Step 1 could require about 4 hours (xen has a force rate limit on export speed)
Step 2 could require 30/60 minutes
Step 3 could require an hour or more (and tons of free disk space)
Step 3 on gigabit connection, requires 1 hours

So, about 7 hours for converting a single VM and about 300gb+300gb of disk space

Any faster solution?

 

[dcsapak]

what is the storage backend of the xenserver?

 

[Alessandro 123]

Local storage with lvm

 

[dcsapak]

then you could try to export the lvs directly with e.g. dd, but i do not know how xenserver manages the lvs, so this might not work

 

[Alessandro 123]

Xen manages everything in the worst case possible.

What about exporting an OVA? Is proxmox able to import that? This could allow me to skip the whole convertion phase

 

[dcsapak]

What about exporting an OVA? Is proxmox able to import that? This could allow me to skip the whole convertion phase

there are plans for this, but nothing really usable yet.

but if you can export in ova format (which is just a tar archive afaik), which format has the disk inside? maybe you can use that directly?

 

[Alessandro 123]

XVA is a tar archive with raw disk images splitter in 1mb chunks that needs to be reconstructed via xenmigrate

OVA I don't know which disk image has inside, but should be standard. I think it's a VMDK and qemu is able to convert it.
This allow me to skip the xenmigrate phase but add the qemu convertion that could be slower than a simple file concatenation