Migrate from XenServer

[Alessandro 123]

Hi to all
The only way to migrate from XenServer is by exporting the XVA, manually creating the new VM on PVE and then converting virtual disk from the XVA dump to raw image ?

Are there any other methods? I have to migrate a bounch of hosts and this way is very slow and requires too much user intervantion. and downtime.

 

[LnxBil]

Have your read the documentation?
https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Migration_of_servers_to_Proxmox_VE

You can also try online migration, etc. Migration times depend heavily on the guest systems.

I migrated 30+ linux guests from XenSource to Proxmox without any problems. Everything was manually done in the beginning, but after the third migration you should have a script that does all the work for you. Due to the direct storage access with XenSource, I already had the LVMs which could be transfered 1:1 to the Proxmox infrastructure. I also created all VMs via qm, so that almost everything except the test afterwards was scripted. It will be much more difficult for windows, but hey, that's microsoft.

 

[Alessandro 123]

Yes I've read that docs and I'm talking about the xenmigrate script

How did you do the online migration?
Based on docs i have to export, convert and then add disks to the newly created vm

All steps that i would like to skip, if possible.

Can you describe more your migration procedure? I have to migrate a bounch of huge vms (about 200gb each) keeping downtime low.

 

[LnxBil]

If depends heavily on your guests.

If I'd have to migrate big Linux VMs, I'd build the VM on the target side and then rsync the files over, such that if I shutdown the original VM, the downtime will be as small as possible, because only the changed files will be copied. This approach is also good for testing, because I can start the VM on the target side and test and afterwards restart the rsync to undo all changes I made on the target and also copy all in the meantime changed files over. This works perfectly and is very fast. I migrated a 1 TB fileserver in at most 30 minutes downtime with this approach.

A total online migration is not possible without downtime. Will maybe in 5-10 years or so, but today it is not. No product on the market can do that for all possible situations.

The method in the docs is the less error prone, but not the fastest. Yet again, I'm only talking about the (easy) Linux side of things. Windows is a totally other story. It may be possible with incremental shadow copy stuff, but I'm no microsoft guy.

 

[Alessandro 123]

The rsync way is the one that I'm using actually when i have to migrate big vm.

 

[Alessandro 123]

Creating the whole VM from scratch would be a pain, if the VM is very very old (like Debian Sarge)

Probaby the best way is to shapshot the VM, export the snapshot, run xenconvert to convert the snapshot and then rsync the changed files.
In this way, I don't have to recreate the VM from scratch that is the only thing I would like to avoid.

 

[LnxBil]

What do you mean by "from scratch"? You have to create the VM in Proxmox via GUI (30 seconds work, same with the xen import) then bootup a live linux and rsync all partitions/volumes/mountpoints to the fresh proxmox vm, fix bootsector and done.

The Xen Export/Import and afterwards rsync will of course also work. Maybe a little bit slower, but everything (bootsector, partition layout etc) are just right.

So in the end your initial path cannot be simplified, unfortunately. You can try to script as much as possible to do bulk export/import overnight or so.

 

[Alessandro 123]

Recreating the whole disk/partitions/lvm layout is a pain. I don't want to do this.
i'm not just using a single partition that I can rsync but I'm using many disks with many volume groups and many logical volumes.
In the new VM i have to recreate everything , mount them and then start to sync.