Moving a Virtual Machine from VirtualBox to Proxmox

Nowadays virtualization is a must but sometimes we found virtual machines runing in several plataforms. Having all your virtual machines in one platform helps you to centralize all the administration and reduces maintenance time cost.

In this case we have a Centos 7  pet virtual machine and we need  to migrate from  VirtualBox 6 to Proxmox 6, the process is simple but time needed is dependant of hard drive size and speed.

Step 1. Remove virtual Box guest aditions if they were installed

Just insert Virtual Box guest additions in the virtual machine,

mount guest aditions

mount /dev/sr0 /mnt

go to guest additions dit

cd /mnt

and run uninstaller

./autorun.sh uninstall

Step 2. Export virtual machine to ova

Poweroff your virtual machine and export it

Mark your virtual machine

File-> Export Appliance

and follow the wizard steps

Step 3. Upload ova to proxmox

with sftp or winscp you can upload your image into a place with enough free space, my prefered choice  usually is /var/lib/vz direcory

Step 4.- Uncompress OVA

Basically an ova image is a tar file that includes a dump of hard disks in vmdk format and a xml file ovf that describer the virtual machine.

cd /var/lib/vz

tar xvf yourvmfile.ova

Step 5- Create new Virtual Machine

if you run cat /var/lib/vz/yourvm.ovf you will get all parameters that you need to set, network mac address, ram, number of cpus …. just proxmox interface to complete all data, create a single hard disk of 1gb.

Once the virtual machine is created, delete the 1gb hard disk

Step 6 – Import ova hard drive

just run this command for each disk

qm importdisk <proxmox_vm_id> disk_number.vmdk storatename -format <qcow2, raw>

for example i want to import file test-disk002.vmdk into virtual machine 905, using storage new_disk that support qcow2

qm importdisk 905 test-disk002.vmdk new_disk -format qcow2

step 7- Configure boot disk in proxmox

On proxmox in virtual machine hardware setting click in unusued hard drives and configure storage, Virtio SCSI, ide, sata, Virtio Block , in my case i will use Virtio SCSI.

step 8- Install Guest agent

just run

yum install epel-release

yum install qemu-guest-agent

step 9- Remove ova and hard disk

in your proxmox host just run

cd /var/lib/vz

rm *.ovf *.ova *.mf *.vmdk

Enjoy

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