Migrating XenServer XVA to PVE ZFS

[Alessandro 123]

I was thinking about this procedure:

"xe vm-export" to export an XVA from a VM.
Extract the XVA and then "xenmigrate.py" to convert each partition to a raw img
Create a new PVE virtual machine, somewhere on the PVE server, manually remove the disk image and replace them with the converted raw image.

This should create a bootable VM, converted from an XVA, but now, how can I move this VM to a native ZFS ?

I'll be able to convert to qcow2 on-line with qemu-img, but how to do to the same for ZFS ?

 

[manu]

Hi Alessandro
After you've converted your disk to disk image to qcow2 and have added it to a VM, just click on the "move disk" button in the Hardware options of your VM. There you can select the storage of your choice, including ZFS.

 

[Alessandro 123]

With xenmigrate i'm able to convert to raw images, not to qcow.
Is qcow mandatory ? Should I run qemu-image to convert from raw image to qcow and the move to ZFS storage ?

Keep in mind that VM is already running on ZFS, would be still possible to move from raw (or qcow2) image on ZFS to native ZFS on the same server ?

 

[manu]

Qcow is not mandatory, you can export to raw and add that to the VM.
When moving the disks to your ZFS storage, each raw disk image will be converted to a ZFS zvol.

Now if your VM is running ZFS in a virtualized pool , you will have a nested ZFS setup. This will work, but it is suboptimal.
ZFS is hungry in RAM and CPU, and you will pay double the ressource price for no clear benefit.

 

[Alessandro 123]

Let me try to explain.
I have many XenServer hosts with VMs running in PV mode, that I would like to move to PVE.
To do this, I have to export each VM, convert each disks from XVA to raw images (xenmigrate script doesn't create qcow images but only raw).

Next, to migrate these images to PVE, I have to create a new VM and replace the 'stock' disks with the raw images previously converted, but to create a new PVE virtual machine I have to use the PVE host that is configured with ZFS, so our VM with our converted raw images is already con PVE with ZFS. Is this enough or should I make more steps to create an optimal configuration?

Standard VM on ZFS, would use raw images or any other configuration ? qcow2 would be non-sense on ZFS. A COW image over a COW FS is totally non-sense.