Importing Xen on EL 5.x VMs to oVirt

Summary

oVirt has the ability to import VMs from other hypervisor including Xen on EL 5.x (not yet for Citrix Xen) The Import process uses virt-v2v (under the “INPUT FROM EL 5 XEN” section) which explain the prerequisites that are needed in order to import Xen VMs.

Importing VM

In order to import VMs password-less SSH access has to be enabled between VDSM host and the Xen host. The following steps needed to be done at the VDSM host:

• Generate ssh kes for vdsm user sudo -u vdsm ssh-keygen
• Copy vdsm’s public key to the Xen host sudo -u vdsm ssh-copy-id user@xenhost
• Login to the remote host (in order to test the connection and add the Xen host to the known_hosts file sudo -u vdsm ssh user@xenhost
• Exit the remote Xen host logout

We are logging to the Xen host after we copy the ssh key in order to check that the ssh-copy-id succeeded and in order to set the host’s public key in the ~/.ssh/known_hosts.

Import VMs from Xen

• Login to oVirt admin portal
• In VM tab click the ‘Import’ button in the toolbar
• Select ‘XEN (via EL)’ in the source select box
• Select VDSM host from the ‘Proxy Host’ select box
• Enter valid URI such as: xen+ssh://user@xenhost

Import VMs with Block disks

Currently it is not possible to import Xen VMs with block disks via the webadmin. As a workaround please follow these steps:

• Make sure you have an active export domain
• Run the commands:
• virt-v2v-copy-to-local -ic xen+ssh://root@xenserver.com vmname
• virt-v2v -i libvirtxml vmname.xml -o rhev -of raw -os servername:/path/to/export/domain
• The VM should be present at your export domain, now you can import the Vm to a data domain