How to migrate your Virtual Box machines to the KVM-VirtManager (Part 2)

The first part was an introduction to to Virt Manager and KVM. In this video tutorial, I will show you how to migrate your Virtual Box machines to the Virt Manager.

how-to-migrate-you-virtual-box-machines-to-the-kvm-virtmanagerYou may already have some VMs in your VirtualBox and after watching the video of the first part, you may have started considering that it is time to start the migration process to the Kernel-Based Virtual Machine.

The commands that I use are :

VBoxManage clonehd disk.vdi disk.raw --format raw

which will convert a Virtual Box machines’ disk image to a raw disk format

 

qemu-img convert -f raw disk.raw -O qcow2 disk.qcow2

which will convert the raw disk image to a compressed qcow2 format. We do this because the raw disk format consumes a lot of disk space. After you’ve converted all virtual images you can safely remove VirtualBox from you system completely

Enjoy:

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7 Comments

  1. Congrats on a very good tutorial Salih … I’m about to make the switch from VirtualBox to Virt-Manager, but found that my virtual machines disks are not .vdi but .vmdk. Any tip converting those?
    Thanks in advance!

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      1. Thanks for the reply Salih! …
        I ended up using this command:

        qemu-img convert -f vmdk path/to//VBoxVM.vmdk -O qcow2 NewVM.qcow2

        which worked pretty well even when the VM didn’t boot as I presume there’s differences in the hardware being emulated.. so now I have to figure that out 😉

        Thanks again!

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        1. Yes, that is usually the first problem to fix. As you saw in the video, while I was creating the new VM, I click configure before install to fix the disk format. 🙂

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  2. Salih,I cannot open video, I import ova to KVM, blue screen error 0x0000007B,0x0000005C, can you help me?

    Like

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