[libvirt] Fedora Virtualization ... some comments and a request for help

First some background ... For the last two to three weeks, I have been working with Fedora (Linux) virtualization ... specifically qemu/kvm. I have been a long time user of VMware and and am hoping to migrate to Fedora Virtualization ("to change my problem set"). I have successfully installed and run CentOS 5.3, Fedora 9, and Fedora 11 in both i386 and x86_64 flavors. I have also installed and run Win2k PRO. All of this worked just fine. Mostly I used virt-manager and only resorted to command-line software when there was no alternative. While I initially had some problems with the way sVirt was doing things, I installed the preview set of packages (libvirt 0.6.5, etc) and it is mostly "good enough" [I did find one "bug" which has been bugzillaed]. Now my problem! I am not sure if I am trying to do something which currently cannot be done, if I have found one or more bugs, or if I just need some help to point me in the right direction. I am trying to "migrate" some VMware guests over to qemu-kvm. I have tried Win2k guests, F9 guests, and F11 guests. Because I sense that the HW version of the disk images may be a problem, I made sure that all of the disk images were version 3 or 4. Using vmware-vdiskmanager, I converted any "split disks" into a single file. I tried using the vmdk files from wmare. I tried converting the files (using qemu-img) to both qcow2 and raw format. I tried using partimage-ng to save (on vmware) and then restore (on qemu-kvm) the disk images. Nothing works! For Win2k, the guest system starts booting and then I get a host system kernel oops. I also tried Win2k with qemu only (no kvm) ... the system started booting and then rebooted ... endlessly. For Fedora guests with LVM, grub brings in the kernel but then immediately fails because it cannot find the logical volumes. For Fedora guests with just /boot, swap, and / partitions, they fail after grub loads the kernel because (IIRC) "setuproot" fails ... it cannot find the root partition. I examined all of the virtual disk images that failed with guestfish and they all looked OK. I also attached some of these virtual disks and booted up under the rescue mode of the distribution DVD and the disks looked OK there too. BUT nothing worked! Then I ran some tests with guests created under qemu-kvm. I created a small guest by installing F11 on a SCSI drive (after doing a dance to swap things around). This scsi install installed and ran fine. I then took the disk image file and attached it to another guest as an IDE drive! This booted up and ran fine. Finally, I used partimage-ng to save the disk image originally created as SCSI and restored it to a different ide attached disk image ... this also booted up and ran fine. There is documentation out there (some, not a lot) which says that I should be able to "migrate" guests from VMware to qemu-kvm. For example: http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/How_To_Migrate_From_Vmware_To_KVM [I tried the above procedure, it did not work either] What am I doing wrong??? Any hints (let alone outright explanations) will be appreciated. BTW, there are statements that only vmdk version 3 and 4 formats ware supported. If that is true, why are there error messages issued when a vmdk file is processed which is not version 3 or 4? Gene

On Mon, Jul 13, 2009 at 03:42:35PM -0400, Gene Czarcinski wrote:
First some background ...
For the last two to three weeks, I have been working with Fedora (Linux) virtualization ... specifically qemu/kvm. I have been a long time user of VMware and and am hoping to migrate to Fedora Virtualization ("to change my problem set").
[snip] This is the libvirt project mailing list, not a Fedora support list. There is a dedicated Fedora virtualization list detailed here: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Virtualization#Mailing_List_.26_IRC As well as the other general fedora user/development lists Regards, Daniel -- |: Red Hat, Engineering, London -o- http://people.redhat.com/berrange/ :| |: http://libvirt.org -o- http://virt-manager.org -o- http://ovirt.org :| |: http://autobuild.org -o- http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/ :| |: GnuPG: 7D3B9505 -o- F3C9 553F A1DA 4AC2 5648 23C1 B3DF F742 7D3B 9505 :|

On Monday 13 July 2009 15:49:32 Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
There is a dedicated Fedora virtualization list detailed here:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Virtualization#Mailing_List_.26_IRC
As well as the other general fedora user/development lists
Sorry. I will cease. I had tried some earlier questions to the fedora-virt mailing lists and responses were less than helpful. Gene

On Mon, Jul 13, 2009 at 04:03:13PM -0400, Gene Czarcinski wrote:
On Monday 13 July 2009 15:49:32 Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
There is a dedicated Fedora virtualization list detailed here:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Virtualization#Mailing_List_.26_IRC
As well as the other general fedora user/development lists
Sorry. I will cease.
I had tried some earlier questions to the fedora-virt mailing lists and responses were less than helpful.
I'm sure that Rich Jones and the other folks working on libguestfs and friends will be interested in helping, since VMWare-to-kvm migration is one of the eventual goals of that project... --Hugh

On Monday 13 July 2009 16:27:19 Hugh O. Brock wrote:
On Mon, Jul 13, 2009 at 04:03:13PM -0400, Gene Czarcinski wrote:
On Monday 13 July 2009 15:49:32 Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
There is a dedicated Fedora virtualization list detailed here:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Virtualization#Mailing_List_.26_IRC
As well as the other general fedora user/development lists
Sorry. I will cease.
I had tried some earlier questions to the fedora-virt mailing lists and responses were less than helpful.
I'm sure that Rich Jones and the other folks working on libguestfs and friends will be interested in helping, since VMWare-to-kvm migration is one of the eventual goals of that project...
Thanks for the advice ... I will give the ET mailing list a try. Gene
participants (3)
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Daniel P. Berrange
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Gene Czarcinski
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Hugh O. Brock