Cannot export VM in .ova file

dan2462

Sure, but why cant you guys make it "trivial" in XCP-ng Center? You praise XO so much, but one, it comes with limitations, 2nd its another 3rd party software and 3rd to get full capability it has to be paid, and lastly in order for it to be up to date you need it to have internet access given the license etc.

In short, when you build a closed end system its best to take in what you know or can open and double check. I like XCP-ng and I think you guys have done great job and will hire your system admin in the future but for now certain things have to be achieved and I prefer less systems and those few to work as stated.

Thus, when you mention xe CLI export, it there a tutorial one can view to see the steps?

peder

@dan2462 Don't know what's causing the error but you can export the VHD by ssh:ing to your server or selecting "Local Command shell" on the console and running the following

xe vdi-list 
xe vdi-export uuid=the-uuid-of-your-VM filename=filename.vhd format=vhd

Make sure the location you're saving to has enough space for the file.

If you have curl installed on your VirtualBox machine you can run

curl -u root:your-xcpng-root-password -X GET "server-name-or-IP/export_raw_vdi?vdi=your-vdi-uuid&format=vhd" -o filename.vhd

on it.

dan2462

@peder

Thank you. I will be exporting the file remotely from a machine in datacenter to a local machine via network.

In the past, as I used XCP-ng Center, I just plugged a USB and export .xva to USB directly.

Now, what would be the line command for the above but .ova.

I got the xe-list and xe export, but what would be the next line to command. I'm not very good a command line on cent/redhat. Would I need to mount remote storage usb etc. Please advice, meanwhile thank you much for assistance so far.

dan2462

@peder

About the error, to you knowledge does the system utilize any ports different from the one it uses for .xva? Could be a networking issue as its quite tight.

Or perhaps, can it be some form of limitation of the memory and power allocated to machine itself.

Would really like to find out if i'm the only one that has the same issue, or to be exact to find the root of it.

peder

@dan2462
I don't think you can do a CLI export to ova.
You couldn't in 2015, at least
https://discussions.citrix.com/topic/361151-how-to-export-to-ovaovf-with-command-line/

If you absolutely need ova you have to try and figure out why there's a communication failure.
My guess would be something network related, like a firewall between the XCP-ng server and your XCP-ng Center PC.
Or you're not using the correct setting on the Network page.

Someone said "To solve it I simply had to choose an unused static IP on the same subnet as the Network Management Console where the server pool resides."

I don't know what ports the transfer uses and a quick google search didn't show anything either.

dan2462

@peder

wait... vhd would work too, doesnt have to be just ova.

I tried running a sniffer on the network and saw no requests on any ports from the system other than whats in use, thus same networking layers are used as for .xva.

So i just drilled ssh access to the machine, so would like to do it via cli, if you can perhaps just share with me the rest of command line to move it to remote storage location such as usb, would greatly appreciate it.

xe vdi-list 
xe vdi-export uuid=the-uuid-of-your-VM filename=filename.vhd format=vhd 
......?

olivierlambert

Hi!

Let me clear some things.

@dan2462 said in Cannot export VM in .ova file:

@olivierlambert

Sure, but why cant you guys make it "trivial" in XCP-ng Center? You praise XO so much, but one, it comes with limitations, 2nd its another 3rd party software and 3rd to get full capability it has to be paid, and lastly in order for it to be up to date you need it to have internet access given the license etc.

Because XCP-ng Center is not maintained by Vates, it's only community maintained. We discourage usage of it because there's only one person maintaining it on his freetime, @borzel : he's kind to do this, but he's alone. If you want to assist him and improve XCP-ng Center, go ahead.

It's far less 3rd party than XCP-ng Center which is mainly a clone of XenCenter for Citrix.

Also, Xen Orchestra is fully Open Source. So your statement about licensing is just plain wrong 3 times: If you don't want to pay, you can. If you have a paid license, it works offline too. You can also use XOA Free.

In short, when you build a closed end system its best to take in what you know or can open and double check. I like XCP-ng and I think you guys have done great job and will hire your system admin in the future but for now certain things have to be achieved and I prefer less systems and those few to work as stated.

I strongly recommend Xen Orchestra for a lot of reasons: XCP-ng team is working closely with Xen Orchestra, allowing new features to be added both in server and client. We can test it extensively interactions between those two. It's also completely independent from Citrix choices, which is far better.

We have plans for a XO Lite client that will be embed on XCP-ng, so we can remove the last use case for XCP-ng Center.

peder

@dan2462
Plug the USB stick into your XCP-ng server and run

dmesg | tail 
# You should see "sdb: sdb1" or something similar at the bottom of the screen
mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt
cd /mnt
# Make sure you've mounted the correct device and partition :
df -h . 
# You should see that it's the expected USB size

If that's the case run the xe commands to save on the USB.
When that's done you run

cd /root
sync
umount /mnt

Then it's safe to remove the USB

dan2462

@peder

Thank you. Unfortunately, that machine is in datacenter so dont have physical usb access.

Nevertheless, I found a way to do the conversion. Seems as XenConvert 2.3.1 is capable of doing it, however, its only that version that does it, the rest are all different.

Therefore, issue resolved for conversion, but i'm still wondering if im the only one that had that issue or is it quite common given the system version I have to xcp and the center.

Edwardwsr

Hi Dan2462, I would like you to go for the following steps. In the star just choose the virtual machine and pick the option that says File > Export to OVF. Now add a name for the OVF file and mention a directory in which you need to save it. Here mention if you want to export the virtual machine as an OVF, a folder with individual files, or as an OVA, a single-file archive. At the end press Export to start the procedure of OVF export. This step will take some time and a status bar lets you know about the progress of the export process. Apart from that, https://appuals.com/export-import-vm-oracle/ this website would be really helpful for you in getting to know much more about it. I hope that by following these steps you would be able to resolve this issue.