Migrating a QEMU/KVM Image to VMWare

http://www.oneunified.net/blog/Virtualization/QemuKVMToVMWare.article

I recently found out that ISPs and Managed Service Providers are able to obtain a different licensing schedule from VMWare for hosted services. For some facilities, just starting up, this may be an attractive alternative to VMWare's mainstream licensing policy. Expecting that growth will be a primary driving factor, licensing is based upon a monthly useage fee. One has to become a partner with VMWare in order to take advantage of this program.

With this licensing plan in place, a company is migrating their virtualized guests from QEMU/KVM over to VMWare.

For Linux and Windows boxes, VMWare has a Converter program. For all other guests, it would, at first blush, appear to be a hard problem to solve. However, such is not the case. Instead, it is quite easy to convert and migrate guests from QEMU/KVM over to VMWare.

For Linux guests, while still active on QEMU/KVM, I installed the VMWare tools. This ensures network connectivity once the guest is migrated. On Wheezy/SID Debian, the following command gets the tools loaded:

• apt-get install open-vm-tools open-vm-dkms

Then shutdown the guest.

At the QEMU/KVM host level, run the following command on the image file to prepare it for transfer to VMWare:

• qemu-img convert filename.img -O vmdk filename.vmdk

On the the VMWare vSphere Client, I'll create new guest with a dummy harddrive component.

As I have had issues trying to use VMWare's GUI to upload large files into a datastore. I have also had timeout issues trying to SCP files to a VMWare Host. Instead, I login via SSH into the destination VMWare host, and copy files from there via SSH from the QEMU/KVM Host server. The file gets placed into the newly created guest directory. I then edit settings to delete the temporary connection and connect in the real harddrive/vmdk file.

The guest can be started and should run as normal.