Migration from VMware

As time passes, we are finding more and more people interested in migrating to Xen Project from VMware. The reasons for this migration include cost reduction and increased flexibility in cloud orchestration.

Introduced in the 4.5 release, Xen Project now includes the ability to use VMware VMDK files natively to ease migration. For maximum performance, it is advisable to actually translate the VM files into a raw format. But this step can be delayed, if needed, to facilitate migration.

Disk Conversion

1) Halt the VMware VM. Examine the type of file used by the VM:

# qemu-img info VMware-image.vmdk
image: VMware-image.vmdk
file format: raw
virtual size: 23G
disk size: 23G

2) If the file format is “raw”, we need not convert the image file using qemu-img convert, just rename to .img file. If it is not “raw”, use “qemu-img” to convert the image to raw format.

3) How to convert using qemu-img.

[root@vm_s7 guest22]# qemu-img convert guest22-flat.vmdk -O raw /volumes/guest22/guest22.img

4) Create xen config file in /etc/xen/guest22 , with the renamed/converted image file as disk.

disk = [ ‘file:/volumes/guest22/guest22.img,hda,w’ ]

5) Boot up the xen domU guest. It should boot up fine.