[fedora-virt] Want To Migrate Off Of VMware Server to ???

[Greg Scott]

I'll bet those VM definitions are the VMWare .vmx files that describe the virtual machines.  I've been down this road a bunch over the past several months.  When you use virt-v2v, it reads all the virtual machine attributes from the VMWare side and then creates a new VM with the same attributes on the KVM side.  All of my experience has been with ESX/ESXi on the source end - I haven't tried anything using VMWare server as a source.  

It gets a little trickier if your source VMs have any snapshots.

- Greg


-----Original Message-----
From: virt-bounces at lists.fedoraproject.org [mailto:virt-bounces at lists.fedoraproject.org] On Behalf Of Richard W.M. Jones
Sent: Wednesday, November 16, 2011 2:45 AM
To: Gene Poole
Cc: virt at lists.fedoraproject.org; etpoole60 at comcast.net; jpdsys7 at comcast.net; jpdsys2 at comcast.net
Subject: Re: [fedora-virt] Want To Migrate Off Of VMware Server to ???

On Mon, Nov 14, 2011 at 01:20:02PM -0500, Gene Poole wrote:
> I've got VMware Server 2.0.2 running on a CentOS 5 system (other things 
> are running on the CentOS besides the VMware). I've got a new system and 
> want to migrate off of the VMware, but to what?

Obviously I'm going to say KVM ...

If you want the newest features, then Fedora 16.  If you want
something stable but slower moving, then RHEL 6.

> Questions:
> Is there a 'How To' out there that tells about this 'migration' (tried 
> Google)?
> What about a KVM tutorial?

The Red Hat Virtualization Guides might be a good place to start:

http://docs.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/html/Virtualization/index.html
http://docs.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6-Beta/html/Virtualization_Getting_Started_Guide/index.html
http://docs.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/html/V2V_Guide/index.html
(PDFs are also available -- you have to click the small down-pointing
arrow next to each guide)

These guides apply directly to RHEL 6, but most of the information is
applicable to Fedora as well.

You can also look at the libvirt documentation on http://libvirt.org/

> Can I use the existing VMware Server VM definitions on another machine?

You might want to look at virt-v2v for converting your guests to KVM:

http://libguestfs.org/virt-v2v/

If by "VM definitions" you mean some sort of templates, then I'm
not sure.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
virt-top is 'top' for virtual machines.  Tiny program with many
powerful monitoring features, net stats, disk stats, logging, etc.
http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-top
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