XenServer to Proxmox

Figured out the problem. So first I had to use Xenmigrate python script to go from an XVA file to a raw img file. And then I went and converted it to a qcow2 with qemu-img convert, and then I imported it into Proxmox with qm importdisk. It booted but bluescreened. I'll go into the vm, remove xenserver tools and try another xva export and repeat the process and see if that helps. At least it's progress! :)

Thanks Tom, I'll do that.
 
markmarkmia said:
So first I had to use Xenmigrate python script to go from an XVA file to a raw img file. And then I went and converted it to a qcow2 with qemu-img convert, and then I imported it into Proxmox with qm importdisk
Click to expand...

There is a *much* faster way, in just 1 single step, that i've developed some months ago and tested successfully by migrating about 25 Xen VMs.

If you are interested I can send you the script to test.
 
Hi Alessandro, I've got approx 30 VM'S lined up..
I would love to try your *much* faster way :)
Could you send me the script to test...

Thanks
 
I am going to try Alessandro's script (thanks for sharing), and I know that the OP wanted something automated, but just leaving this here for others like me who are coming here from XenServer. I had great success with using clonezilla to move Windows XP, Server 2003, 2008 and 2012, as well as Debian GNU/Linux 8.x guests from XenServer (all PV) to Proxmox.

-Jonathan
 
Wait, so you powered down the VM, connected the clonezilla CD to the virtual drive, booted to that, created the archive file (for lack of a better word) on a network share, then restored from that onto Proxmox and the resulting VM booted and ran cleanly?
 
Jonathan Hankins said:
I am going to try Alessandro's script (thanks for sharing), and I know that the OP wanted something automated, but just leaving this here for others like me who are coming here from XenServer. I had great success with using clonezilla to move Windows XP, Server 2003, 2008 and 2012, as well as Debian GNU/Linux 8.x guests from XenServer (all PV) to Proxmox.

-Jonathan
Click to expand...

My script doesn't do anything special. It simply skip the extract+merge steps because it does both steps during the VM export.
In my case, with XenServer < 7.1 (so, with export speed capped by XenServer to a very low value), exporting a 100GB VM require about 2 hours for the export and 60-90 minutes for extracting the tarball and the merge each chunks together, so, a total of 3-3.5 hours.

With my script i'm able to export the same VM in only 2 hours because I don' need to extract and merge.

Further step would be to add the ability for `qm import` to read from pipe and do direct conversion or, when using LVM/ZFS, automatically write to block storage during the export phase. This will skip the `qm import` phase at all, resulring in a direct conversion from XenServer to PVE with just a single step.

EDIT: there is also another benefit: you don't need any extra space on PVE host to store the tarball and each extracted chunks before merging them together. Just extract to the final file. 100GB used on XenServer, 100GB used on PVE.
 
NewDude said:
Wait, so you powered down the VM, connected the clonezilla CD to the virtual drive, booted to that, created the archive file (for lack of a better word) on a network share, then restored from that onto Proxmox and the resulting VM booted and ran cleanly?
Click to expand...

I booted the xenserver VM from the clonezilla virtual media and selected remote-source, then booted the new proxmox VM I'd just created to receive the data with the clonezilla virtual media, and selected remote-destination.

There's some fiddling with the virtual disk to switch to the virtio drivers after cloning, but all of my VMs booted after cloning and I was able to get the virtio drivers to load. I made some rough notes about the steps I took if you're interested.
 
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Jonathan Hankins said:
I made some rough notes about the steps I took if you're interested.
Click to expand...
I'd love to see them. :)

I'm evaluating all options here. My goal is to migrate VMs (or rebuild them if I have to) from my datacenter that's in another state to the cluster I'm building at home. Max bandwidth would probably be 10 MB/s, and if I'm not careful that will really drive up my bandwidth bill for the month so I'll probably have set some rate limiting on the VPN link.

Hell, if I thought it would work well I'd just create the new VM here, set the origin VM's web site into read-only mode, rsync the whole damn filesystem, edit the fstab, reboot, and hope for the best. I'm just not convinced that will work very well yet.
 
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NewDude said:
I'd love to see them. :)

I'm evaluating all options here. My goal is to migrate VMs (or rebuild them if I have to) from my datacenter that's in another state to the cluster I'm building at home. Max bandwidth would probably be 10 MB/s, and if I'm not careful that will really drive up my bandwidth bill for the month so I'll probably have set some rate limiting on the VPN link.

Hell, if I thought it would work well I'd just create the new VM here, set the origin VM's web site into read-only mode, rsync the whole damn filesystem, edit the fstab, reboot, and hope for the best. I'm just not convinced that will work very well yet.
Click to expand...

10Mbps would be very painful for pretty much any option that transfers filesystems over the link. Could you take or ship media to the data center and export/clonezilla-image locally then bring/ship it home? I was cloning VM to VM over 1Gbps links, with a 10Gbps backbone and getting an average of 3GB/min.

As far as exporting from xenserver vs clonezilla, I don't know if exporting from xenserver creates "thin" files or if they are roughly the same size as a the guest's disk. With clonezilla, your image size (or transfer size if doing VM to VM) should be just a bit bigger than the used space on the filesystems, which could be no big deal or a really big deal, depending on your VMs.

I'll reply with my post-clone notes when I get a minute.
 
Yeah. The best option may be to create a new VM, rsync the filesystem and get all the files across, then set the site read-only, dump the database, gzip it, transfer that, rsync one more time while the database is decompressing on the target machine, import and database, test, and switch DNS over. It might take hours, but hopefully I'll only be doing it once.
 
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