[TUTORIAL] Creating Barracuda VM in Proxmox

[Marvin]

In case someone in the future can benefit from our experience, here is a quick tutorial for loading a Barracuda (kvm) VM in Proxmox:

Creating Barracuda VM on Proxmox Virtual Environment
How to convert Barracuda KVM image to Proxmox LVM (raw) image

Proxmox VE is a highly evolved virtual environment using KVM and QEMU. This instruction is based upon our experience deploying a Barracuda VM on Proxmox VE with LVM.
https://www.proxmox.com/en/

Barracuda is a proprietary firewall system that has some products available as VM images. They don't supply images as .iso for easy import into Proxmox. But with a little work, their kvm image can be converted to work.

Download and extract Barracuda KVM image

• Request and download the appropriate Barracuda VM image (kvm) from their website. They will send an email with links and temporary license. After 30 days a permanent license will be required.
• Next is to extract the xxx.kvm.sh file from the downloaded .zip (e.g. install.GWAY-7.1.3-061-VFxxx.kvm.sh).
• The above xxx.kvm.sh file needs to be uploaded to Proxmox into a temporary location that is large enough to house both the xxx.kvm.sh file and the resulting .img file that will be extracted next. These files are large (e.g. Control Center .img file is about 250Gb) and enough disk space is required to allow the extraction process.
o Example (to upload from a Windows workstation to Proxmox with pscp): pscp [localpath]\ install.GWAY-7.1.3-061-VFxxx.kvm.sh root@[Proxmox IP]:[temp location path]/install.GWAY-7.1.3-061-VFxxx.kvm.sh
o Make the file executable within Proxmox: > chmod +x install.GWAY-7.1.3-061-VFxxx.kvm.sh
o Start the .sh built-in extraction script > ./install.GWAY-7.1.3-061-VFxxx.kvm.sh

 Give the full path for the image and configuration files.
 Choose Non-sparse file.
 All other selections are according to your needs.​

Create Proxmox VM

• Create a VM on Proxmox with cores/memory/disk size according to advises on Barracuda Campus website for creating kvm vm.
• Make the disk size a bit larger than the minimum recommended. It can be expanded later if needed.
Overwrite Proxmox VM Image File with Extracted kvm .img File
• This instruction assumes LVM storage, but probably applies to other forms of storage (e.g qcow, etc) with appropriate dd command adjustments.
• > dd if=/[temp location path]/ GWAY-7.1.3-061-VFxxx.img of=/dev/[LVM image disk]/vm-[vm number]-disk-0 status=progress
• This step can take quite a while.​

Start Proxmox VM

• Monitor the VM from its console.
• On first start, the initial configuration menu will be shown.
• Select Basic configuration and follow instructions.
• When Basic configuration is complete, it will return to the menu.
• Select Reboot.
• On Proxmox it will NOT reboot, but will present the VM's CLI login screen. Login to the VM and manually and command a reboot: > reboot. THIS STEP IS VITAL FOR CORRECT OPERATION (otherwise a very long reboot will occur with a hang-up at “booting from hard disk…”
• At this point the VM should operate normally.​

Hope this is helpful.

 

[ness1602]

Hi instead of dding image,you could do qm importdisk vmid file.qcow2 storage?

 

[stefanzman]

Thanks for this. I was spinning my wheels for a while. As for the follow up question, I had tried the qm import disk without success. DDing as specified above worked, but I had to make sure that Raw was specified for the image in the shell script.