[Libguestfs] Trying to get started with virt-p2v

[Matthew Booth]

On 28/06/11 18:22, Greg Scott wrote:
> As promised...results so far.
>
> I built up a Fedora 14 VM and did "yum install virt-v2v".  This
> downloaded and installed a bazillion dependencies and ran successfully
> to completion.  Next, I did "virt-p2v-image-builder".  This downloaded
> and installed a bunch more stuff and successfully ran to completion.
> And it created an ISO file named /home/gregs/virt-p2v.iso.  So far so
> good.
>
> I burned the ISO to a CD, brought it over to a test PC and booted it.
> The boot hangs in a blue colored Fedora screen and just stops.  OK, that
> PC is an old piece of junk Dell Optiplex.  But it's been good enough to
> run Windows for several years.

The boot CD needs to work with a wide variety of hardware, including 
piece of junk Dell Optiplexes. This requires thought.

> Trying again on my much nicer Lenovo laptop - this time it boots into
> the virt-p2v screen.  It shows me that eth0 is connected after I finally
> plugged in the cable.  And then it rebooted?!?

It goes without saying that shouldn't happen :)

> Ahh - I see what I did wrong.  I always hit ESC when Fedora boots cuz I
> want to see what's going on.

That shouldn't make any difference.

Plus, I didn't have the Ethernet cable
> connected.

That shouldn't make any difference either, but it's possible there could 
be bug.

The laptop rebooted, this time it came to the "Connect to
> conversion server" screen.
>
> So now I think I'm ready to try a test with a real server.

I think it's clear we need some way to extract debug info from the P2V 
boot image. Right now P2V simply reboots immediately on completion, 
whether successful or not. There are 2 situations we need to cover:

1. P2V client doesn't launch (including boot failure)
2. P2V client fails.

The main problem, of course, is where to put it...

Greg, thanks for your efforts. I'm going to have to think about how we 
can handle this better.

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

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