vsphere

RHEV: How to Import a VMware ESXi OVA Disk Image into RHEV-M

/ Christopher Paquin / 1 Comment

424782-cloud-computing

Introduction

In my lab, I am in the process of moving off of Vmware/ESXi and onto RHEV (Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization). So far the learning curve has not been that bad….

Installing and configuring RHEV-M was just as simple as installing a few packages on top of RHEL 6. I had an unused desktop that was more than up for the task.  For RHEV-H… Well I had just finished building out a new server for it. Once my initial hardware was up and running it was time to start moving virtual machines out of Vsphere.

Virt-V2V Conversion Failures

And this is when I started to run into trouble. Using virt-v2v, the process was simple for existing RHEL vms. I imported a couple of them without issue.

However, I ran into a few issues when I started trying to import non RHEL VMs. In particular, my OpenVPN appliance running Ubuntu was putting up a good fight.

virt-v2v: error: virt-v2v is unable to convert this guest type
(linux/ubuntu)
If reporting bugs, run virt-v2v with debugging enabled and include the
complete output:

Ok, very unexpected – so lets try another approach.

OVA Import Failures

This time I decided to attempt to export the VM as on OVA file. However this did not work either as the OVA file was not recognized as a gzip file by the rhevm-image-uploader (run from the RHEVM server).

# rhevm-image-uploader -e pandora-export-vol01 upload vpn.lab.localdomain.ova
Please provide the REST API password for the admin@internal oVirt Engine user (CTRL+D to abort):
ERROR: not a gzip file

The Workaround

However not all was lost, as I was able to leverage the exported VM files to convert the the VMDK of my vm to img format.

#qemu-img convert -f vmdk vpn.lab.localdomain-disk1.vmdk -O raw vpn.lab.localdomain-disk1.img

Once the disk was successfully converted, I used qemu-info to verify its size.

# qemu-img info vpn.lab.localdomain-disk1.img
image: vpn.lab.localdomain-disk1.img
file format: raw
virtual size: 8.0G (8589934592 bytes)
disk size: 2.8G

I then logged into RHEV and created a new virtual machine which I named vpn.lab.localdomain. For all intents and purposes, it is just a placeholder VM with an empty 8GB disk.

Then using rhevm-shell ran the following command to get a list of existing vms and their disks.

[RHEVM shell (connected)]# list vms

id : 93a873a0-2fc2-4d73-952e-58e934d7ecea
name : vpn.lab.localdomain

[RHEVM shell (connected)]# list disks

id : d239f1c7-4fab-43fd-a7e9-ff5add0d53de
name : vpn.lab.localdomain_Disk1

I knew that the disk image for vpn.lab.localdomain was housed on the NFS mount below. All I needed was the UUID of the disk.

# showmount -e freenas
Export list for freenas:
/mnt/freenas-vol01 192.168.0.0,10.1.0.0

So I mounted the NFS share on my RHEVM server as /freenas-vol01

# mount -t nfs freenas.lab.localdomain:/mnt/freenas-vol-1 /mnt

I then navigated /freenas-vol01/4f46e5ca-a417-45d7-9dbf-2d400207fdaa/images and looked for a directory with this name (d239f1c7-4fab-43fd-a7e9-ff5add0d53de). Note that this is the same name as the UUID that I found a few steps above.

Note: It’s the second one in the list.

# ls -rlt
drwxr-xr-x. 2 vdsm kvm 5 Sep 14 12:39 aa1c9b26-00f0-45b0-9cca-224339448347
drwxr-xr-x. 2 vdsm kvm 5 Sep 14 12:45 d239f1c7-4fab-43fd-a7e9-ff5add0d53de
drwxr-xr-x. 2 vdsm kvm 5 Sep 14 13:53 021227e4-bb19-4747-a7a9-e522402fa6fa
drwxr-xr-x. 2 vdsm kvm 5 Sep 14 13:53 390298bc-94f0-477a-b437-5898e3f664be

Now cd to d239f1c7-4fab-43fd-a7e9-ff5add0d53de and inspect its contents

# ls -rlt
total 949342
-rw-r–rw-. 1 vdsm kvm 321 Sep 14 12:45 a50ce217-5c51-4f89-afe3-2c650a21c3b0.meta
-rw-rw-rw-. 1 vdsm kvm 1048576 Sep 14 12:45 a50ce217-5c51-4f89-afe3-2c650a21c3b0.lease
-rw-rw-rw-. 1 vdsm kvm 8589934592 Sep 14 16:44 a50ce217-5c51-4f89-afe3-2c650a21c3b0

There are three files here, but only one is 8Gb in size, which is not coincidentally the same size of the disk I created. This is the new empty disk on our new vm.

Now lets dd or original disk onto this disk. This overwrites the contents of the new disk, with the contents of the original disk.

#dd if=/root/vpn.lab.localdomain-disk1.img of=a50ce217-5c51-4f89-afe3-2c650a21c3b0 bs=4M

Much to my surprise I was able to boot up the vm without issue.

Vmware VCenter Virtual Appliance – Death to Windows.. I think.

/ Christopher Paquin / 1 Comment

6a00d8341c77ee53ef01630028e663970dI am, and have always been, a Linux/Unix Administrator, until VMware forced me to learn a bit of Windows.

This, above all, has been the very WORST part about Vmware. Just to run Virtual Center, I had to BUY Windows, I had to Install Windows, and I had to try to learn Windows.  Oh, and then I had to slap some sort of virus protection on it, and figure out how to patch it. And then worst of all try to authenciate to it, as I am not administering Active Directory. No, I use Openldap, as any Linux/Unix admin would.

Then on top of that I needed Windows to even run the VCenter Client and Connect to my VCenter Server.  Well hell, I don't run Windows, not even on my desktop, not even on my laptop… not at home and not in the office. Its been this way for 5 years and VMware, is not going to make me change this.

Now, flash forward to VSphere 5.1, and low and behold, what is this. A real, fully functioning, web client for VCenter. Ok now we are getting somewhere. Now, I have not had a ton of experience with it, but my first impressions are pretty good. Its flashy, its fast, and it appears to be fully functioning.

To further make my day, the Vmware VCenter Appliance is now no longer beta (this is probably old news to most). For those who are not in the know, its Linux (albeit Suse).  So I am downloading it now and am going to give it a spin. How fully functioning is it… I have no idea. Do I need a database somewhere or does it have one built in? I do know it can connect to oracle, which is really neat, but not as neat as postgres or mysql. Also, how awesome would it be if I could configure the thing to use Openldap for auth?

Dunno all the answers yet, but I should have more insight on the topic soon, so stand by.

 

Related articles

vCenter Server 5: Important Tip while Installation

Removing a Virtual Disk from CentOS/RHEL via vSphere Client

/ Christopher Paquin / Leave a comment

PxdxaDisco08 When you right click on a VM via the vSphere client and click edit setting you will see your hard disk enumerated as follows:

Hard disk 1 - Virtual Disk

Hard disk 2 - Virtual Disk

However CentOS/RHEL enumerates your disks using a different nomenclature. See below:

Disk /dev/sda: 21.4 GB, 21474836480 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 2610 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1        1044     8385898+  83  Linux
/dev/sda2            1045        2349    10482412+  83  Linux
/dev/sda3            2350        2610     2096482+  82  Linux swap

Disk /dev/sdb: 268.4 GB, 268435456000 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 32635 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1               1       32635   262140606   83  Linux

[[truncated]]

While you can assume that the your first disk listed in ESX is your first disk listed via the OS, this is not always the case. You can attempt to compare disk sizes to further determine which disk is which, however the sizes do not always match up.

The best way to identify disks is via the Virtual Device Node, which is visible via the virtual disk properties in ESX and via the command lsscsi in Centos/OS.

More than likely lsscsi is not installed via default so you are going to either need to install via yum, or download a rpm and install. Once installed run as seen below

>lsscsi
[0:0:0:0]    disk    VMware   Virtual disk     1.0   /dev/sda
[0:0:1:0]    disk    VMware   Virtual disk     1.0   /dev/sdb
[0:0:2:0]    disk    VMware   Virtual disk     1.0   /dev/sdc
[0:0:3:0]    disk    VMware   Virtual disk     1.0   /dev/sdd

The first two numbers are unique to the scsi controller and the second two numbers indicate the disk number which can be seen in the disk properties in the vsphere client properties.

For example in vmware Hard disk 4 has a virtual device id of “SCSI (0:3) Hard Disk 4, and by running lsscsi I know for sure that this disk is /dev/sdd. Now I can remove the disk with confidence from esx and have to worry that I removed the wrong disk.

ESX Post Install – Enable NTP and SNMP

/ Christopher Paquin / Leave a comment

FirewallThis post is the first in what I suspect will be a semi-long list of post-install hints and tips as I go through and start rebuilding my cluster as Vsphere 4. Hopefully I will learn a lot along the way… like for example the fact the ntp and snmp traffic is not allowed by default by the ESX Firewall.

But before we go there we first need to make sure that our services are starting at boot.

>chkconfig ntp on, … do the same for snmp

Then lets fix the firewall. First lets fix ntp.

esxcfg-firewall -e ntpClient

Then lets verify that all is well with…

esxcfg-firewall -q ntpClient

This command returns…

Service ntpClient is enabled

Ok now lets fix snmp using the same commands above, but specific for snmp.

esxcfg-firewall -e snmp and esxcfg-firewall -q snmpd.

While you are at it add the following to you snmp.conf

dlmod SNMPESX /usr/lib/vmware/snmp/libSNMPESX.so

Then restart snmp and ntp and you should be good.