ESXi migartion to OpenNebula

Hello, I am new to OpenNebula. I have a couple of servers with ESXi (I don’t have vCenter) that I would like to migrate to hosts with KVM managed by OpenNebula.

I would like to know the procedure for importing the VMs to the hosts. So far, I have converted the disks to qcow2 and moved them to the hosts.

Should I import them into Qemu and add them as wild VMs? Is there a way to do this with OpenNebula without having to create a datastore image for each disk and a template for each VM to be migrated?

Is it possible to create a dummy disk in the template and replace it with the path of the disk file to be used when the VM is instantiated?

Thanks in advance

1 Like

Hi @alopez,

To migrate VMs from ESXi to KVM managed by OpenNebula, you can directly import the qcow2 disks into OpenNebula. You don’t necessarily need to create a datastore image for each disk or a template for each VM beforehand. You can add them as wild VMs in OpenNebula and adjust configurations as needed, including linking actual disk paths dynamically during instantiation.

Hi @alopez

It is also possible to use one-swap application to migrate and convert automatically directly from VMware ESX to OpenNebula, injecting the necessary context packages and virtio drivers and register the VM disks into OpenNebula.

Please, visit the oneswap WIKI to obtain more information about the project:

We recommend you to have a look to the “Optional Parameters” section in the Parameters page:

There you will find information of how to connect directly to the ESX’s in order to download and convert your VMs and transfer them to OpenNebula.

Thanks for your replies. I will try the one-swap version and let you know.
By the way, the one-swap version recommends using Ubuntu 24.04. Is it officially supported by OpenNebula? For the community edition, I have only seen the repository for Ubuntu 22.04.

Hi @apicon,

Is it possible to use one swap without VMWare vCenter?

Thanks

Albert

OpenNebula v6.10 LTS CE/EE has been recently released with support for Ubuntu Server 24.04 LTS. Repositories for CE for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS are now available.

Unfortunately, the use case you mention is not supported as one-swap is designed to connect to vCenter to obtain VM templates and download VMDK images.