create xen image from vmware image fails

Submitted by sgrayban on Wed, 06/16/2010 - 08:30

I got a client that has a windows xp vmware image that I just tried to convert to xen... it didn't work

Converting from VMware to full disk format ..
.. converted image size is 40 GB

Extracting biggest partition from full disk ..
.. no Linux partitions found

What does a linux partition have to do with windows ?

Status: 
Closed (fixed)

Comments

Submitted by JamieCameron on Wed, 06/16/2010 - 17:57

The issue is that Cloudmin's Xen support only works with partition images currently, not entire disks .. so you cannot yet import a Windows (or Linux) image that is of a whole disk.

Submitted by JamieCameron on Wed, 06/16/2010 - 17:58

This is being worked on though, as part of a larger project to support HVM, installing from CDs, and non-Linux Xen instances..

Submitted by sgrayban on Wed, 06/16/2010 - 21:22

So how can I convert his VMware image to xen then and allow him to use it ?

Submitted by JamieCameron on Thu, 06/17/2010 - 20:31

Right now, you'd have to do it manually with commands like :

qemu-img convert -f vmdk /path/to/image.vmdk -O raw /var/webmin/server-manager/windows-image.raw

Then create a /var/webmin/server-manager/windows-image.img file like :

files=windows-image.raw
desc=My Windows Image
id=windows-image
manager=xen
size=$size_of_file
rawsize=$size_of_file

Submitted by sgrayban on Thu, 06/17/2010 - 22:03

Is the rawsize= in GB, MB or bytes ?

What about the size= ?

Submitted by JamieCameron on Fri, 06/18/2010 - 17:18

Both are in bytes.

Submitted by sgrayban on Wed, 06/23/2010 - 13:23

New bug with this now...

Waiting for creation to complete ..... creation failed: Failed to extract filesystem : gzip: /var/webmin/server-manager/windows-xp.raw: not in gzip format

So I need to gzip it or is this a CM bug ?

Submitted by JamieCameron on Thu, 06/24/2010 - 02:39

That looks like a Cloudmin bug - however, a quick work-around is to edit /var/webmin/server-manager/windows-xp.img and add the line nocompress=1

Submitted by sgrayban on Thu, 06/24/2010 - 13:43

And it looks like converted windows vmware images aren't bootable but thanks for the help.

Submitted by JamieCameron on Sat, 06/26/2010 - 00:40

Yeah, there is a bunch more work needed in Cloudmin before Windows will work, sorry..