exporting proxmox VM so can try using ubuntu / kvm

[Neil Duffy]

Hi,

Does anyone know if this possible?

I have a Windows 7 server running under Proxmox that I'd like to preserve all I've done (which would be a backup / restore), but not sure what I'd need for KVM using qemu to be able to run the same VM.

Any idea's?

Thanks

Neil

 

[Derek Rasmussen]

Hey Neil,

Assuming you want to restore the VM to the same or a different KVM machine you would have to do the following.

vzdump <vmid>
#move the dump to where it needs to go
qmrestore <path to backed up image> <new vmid>

Here are the steps I took recently to move a VM to a new cluster.

vzdump 157 -dumpdir /var/lib/vz/dump/
scp /var/lib/vz/dump/vzdump-qemu-157-2017_12_03-07_26_55.vma root@newvm:~
#log onto newvm
qmrestore vzdump-qemu-157-2017_12_03-07_26_55.vma 101

This dumps the VM with the ID of 157 to a directory, allows us to copy it somewhere. Then you can use qmrestore to restore the qemu image and get it right back into a qemu machine as it doesn't have to be proxmox.

 

[LnxBil]

As far as I understood @Neil Duffy, he wants to import in plain QEmu, not Proxmox VE KVM, so in addition to @Derek Rasmussen's answer, you have to unpack the backup file via

vma extract

which yields a RAW file and a PVE configuration. Best would be to start the VM on Proxmox VE and extract the complete command line via

ps aux | grep <vmid>

Afterwards it'll most probably work on a plain QEmu machine.