[Libguestfs] [ESX support] Working ESX conversion for RHEL 5

[Matthew Booth]

On 03/02/10 23:45, Adam Huffman wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 1, 2010 at 5:23 PM, Matthew Booth <mbooth at redhat.com> wrote:
>> With this patchset I have successfully[1] imported a RHEL 5 guest directly from
>> ESX with the following command line:
>>
>> virt-v2v -ic 'esx://yellow.marston/?no_verify=1' -op transfer RHEL5-64
>>
>> Login details are stored in ~/.netrc
>>
>> Note that this is the only guest I've tested against. I haven't for example,
>> checked that I haven't broken Xen imports.
> 
> Will this work, or can this be easily modified to work for VMware Server guests?
> 

Adam,

I haven't looked at VMware Server, but my best guess is that this
wouldn't be straightforward. I would expect the guest modifications to
be identical. The issue would be in obtaining the guest metadata and
storage.

For ESX we use libvirt's existing driver, which means we don't have to
parse vmx ourselves. Also, ESX conveniently makes a raw version of the
guest's storage available, which means we don't have to parse vmdk.
Without looking at VMware Server, my guess would be that it embeds vmx
in the guest's vmdk, and doesn't make raw storage available directly. If
this is the case, we'd need to be able to parse vmdk properly, and
extract and parse the vmx. While qemu nominally includes support for
vmdk, it only supports a subset of internal storage types, and it
doesn't support the latest version of the format. Fixing that up would
probably be a prerequisite.

Let me know if my assumptions are wrong! It could be easier than that.
If you're in the mood for submitting patches, we can certainly help you
get going.

Matt
-- 
Matthew Booth, RHCA, RHCSS
Red Hat Engineering, Virtualisation Team

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