Import non-PVE-created LXC container into PVE 5.2

[Will Dennis]

Hi all,

I have a number of LXC containers that were created on Ubuntu 14.04 (LXC ver 1.0.7) that I would like to import into PVE 5.2.

I have seen/read this post: https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/h...xc-container-to-a-proxmox-lxc-container.24138 but even after reading that, it is nebulous as to exactly how to do this... I did make a tarball of the non-PVE LXC container's rootfs, but must I inject a "etc/vzdump/pct.conf" file into the container then use "pct restore", or is there another way of doing this using the rootfs tarball? (note that I don't want to create a template, just "import" an existing container off another system.)

Seems like importing non-PVE-created LXC containers might be a thing, but can't find any "HOWTOs" about doing this.

Thanks.

 

[fabian]

a template is also just a rootfs + associated metadata have you tried using your rootfs archive as ostemplate via 'pct create' ? depending on whether you want to keep network, dns etc. setup you might want to set the 'ostype' to unmanaged (or not)

 

[Will Dennis]

Perhaps you missed this, but...

[...] (note that I don't want to create a template, just "import" an existing container off another system.)

Here's what I ended up doing, seems like it may have worked...

1) On the source LXC system, I backed up the desired containers "rootfs" contents to a tarball via:
root@oldlxchost:/tmp# find /var/lib/lxc/my_old_container/rootfs -printf "%P\n" | tar -czf my_old_container_amd64.tar.gz --no-recursion -C /var/lib/lxc/my_old_container/rootfs -T -
2) Then I transferred this tarball onto the target Proxmox 5.2 system.
3) Since I am storing container root disk images on a ZFS filesystem ("datapool"), I pre-created a subvolume for the disk (having pre-determined that I'd make this container ID '150' and that the target disk size would be '500G'):
root@pve01:/# zfs create datapool/subvol-150-disk-1
root@pve01:/# zfs set xattr=sa datapool/subvol-150-disk-1
root@pve01:/# zfs set acltype=posixacl datapool/subvol-150-disk-1
root@pve01:/# zfs set refquota=500G datapool/subvol-150-disk-1
4) Then, I restored from the previously-made tarball, passing all required config statements that would be found in a "pct.conf" file on the command line:
root@pve01:/tmp# pct restore 150 my_old_container_amd64.tar.gz \
> --arch amd64 \
> --cores 12 \
> --hostname my-new-container \
> --memory 98304 \
> --net0 name=eth0,bridge=vmbr0,hwaddr=E2:E6:48:01:02:03,ip=dhcp,ip6=dhcp,type=veth \
> --ostype ubuntu \
> --rootfs local-zfs:subvol-150-disk-1,size=500G \
> --swap 2048
Even though the restore process issued a message stating "No config file found", it did create a container, and upon starting it, it is running correctly, and looks OK.

I took the "cores", "memory", and "swap" values from the old container's settings, and made up the "hwaddr" value in the "net0" stanza by starting with "E2:E6:48:" (which seems to be the Proxmox OUI) and then appending three random hex values for the host ID.

A bit of work, but seems to give me what I need in the way of "importing" containers from LXC 1.x to Proxmox...