[virt-tools-list] virt-v2v questions

[Kenneth Armstrong]

> Not sure what the difference is.  A shut down VM consists of just the
> disk image(s) and the hypervisor-specific configuration file.  The
> configuration file isn't really necessary, since you could reconstruct
> all the information in it (with some effort) by inspecting the disk
> image.

I'm going to look into virt-inspector (just installed it) to see what
that all entails.  Currently, RHEV is still using VDSM and not libvirt
explicitly yet, so I can't do an XML dump of a VM as far as I know.

How would I go about copying a logical volume off of a remote server
through SSH (or some other means)?

> This seems like a very RHEV-M-specific question, but AFAIK RHEV-M just
> uses qcow2 format files stored in logical volumes.  qcow2 is about as
> portable and standard as it comes ("raw" being the only thing that is
> more portable and widely supported, and you can convert from qcow2 to
> raw with perfect fidelity using 'qemu-img convert').

I'm just using RAW for my disk images (for the speed, and I have
enough storage to pull it off).

Thanks again for your help.


On Tue, Nov 2, 2010 at 9:09 AM, Richard W.M. Jones <rjones at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 02, 2010 at 08:51:41AM -0400, Kenneth Armstrong wrote:
>> Are you saying just back up the contents of the VM itself or back up
>> the VM as a whole?
>
> Not sure what the difference is.  A shut down VM consists of just the
> disk image(s) and the hypervisor-specific configuration file.  The
> configuration file isn't really necessary, since you could reconstruct
> all the information in it (with some effort) by inspecting the disk
> image.
>
>> I'd like to find a way to just give the VM a
>> proper name (I'll look into virt-inspector, thanks for that) and copy
>> the logical volumes that make up the VM disks onto an external media.
>> Of course, I would have to use something else at a later time to
>> import the VM's back into RHEV or a KVM server later should I need to,
>> but for now I would like to get them off of my export storage domain
>> and store them in a more portable format than what RHEV does.
>
> This seems like a very RHEV-M-specific question, but AFAIK RHEV-M just
> uses qcow2 format files stored in logical volumes.  qcow2 is about as
> portable and standard as it comes ("raw" being the only thing that is
> more portable and widely supported, and you can convert from qcow2 to
> raw with perfect fidelity using 'qemu-img convert').
>
> Rich.
>
> --
> Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
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