The last week or so I have been converting my Windows test environment from VMWare Server to XenServer 5.0. The process is really quite easy and covered by CTX116603.
I will briefly run through how to convert your Vmware virtual machines for importing into XenServer.
Pre-converion tasks
- Remove or rollup any snapshots that are part of your virtual machine to be converted
- Startup the virtual machine and then remove vmware tools and any other applications or software not required
- shut down the virtual machine
Virtual machine conversion
Before you continue here you will need to download the XenServer Virtual Disk Migration Utility. See the link about to the CTX support document.
- Once you have downloaded and unzipped the utility open a command prompt
- change directory to where you saved and unzipped the software
- initiate the conversion process, using this command
v2xva.exe /config:”c:\pathToSource\source.vmx” /output:”c:\pathToDest”
Mounting virtual disk images for processing…
Load registry to enable XVA import:
The operation completed successfully
Perform registry update operations….The operation completed successfully
Convert VMDK virtual disk image to XVA…
Total disks to convert: 1Converting Disk 0…
Unmount virtual disk images…
Done.
Thats simple isn’t it. It will take a while to process depending on the number of disks and the size of the virtual machine. With XenServer 5.0 Windows virtual machines are limited to 3 hard drives. If you try and convert a virtual machine with more than 3 virtual hard drives you might see an abnormal application termination error.
Import the Virtual machine into XenServer
- Log into XenCenter
- Click on VM – Import
- Select the import type – Exported VM
- Change the file type to .xml and select the ova.xml
- Add it to you XenServer
- Select the storage area you want to use, most likely it will the Local Storage
- Add a network interface
- Click Finish
The import will begin and take some time depending on the size of the virtual machine.
If you have imported a Windows virtual machine that had more than 3 virtual disks you will have some issues. Your virtual machine will likely not have a virtual cdrom added. If you try and add the cdrom you will get an error message and a non descript error.
Overall the process is very easy. I have not used VMWares Virtual Center product as it was another license that had to be purchased, but the import process is much easier than the manual import into a VMWare ESX server.
XenServer does not have a snapshot capability as such, so you will need to operate slightly differently. It does however allow you to export to backup file.
XenServer also seems to allocate the full amount of virtual disk space as well. So if you have a virtual hard drive that is 70GB it will allocated the full physical space. This is both annoying and good. It will prevent any accidental over allocation of disk capacity.
Do you have any other experiences with XenServer? Let us know.
May 20th, 2009
Note that the new release, version 5.5, which is due out in June supports both thin provisioning and disk snapshots for backup support (though not memory snapshots for rollback).
May 20th, 2009
Thanks Roger.
Disk snapshots are very useful when it comes to testing procedures and upgrades.
Colin
November 25th, 2009
Hi, I followed all the steps given above.
My VM(OS: w2k3 server)gets booted up successfully on XENServer
But I am unable to use my base machine’s Mouse and Keyboard there at all.
I am stucked up at the login screen with Error: “Atleast one service/driver failed during system startup”
Please help !!!
November 27th, 2009
This sounds like the hardware has not been detected correctly in the migrated machine.
If you removed the VMware tools you should not get this issue. If you cannot get any keyboard to work they you are stuck.
There is a improved way to migrate now. Have a look at this article.
http://support.citrix.com/article/ctx116603
Colin