Migration
Migration onto the OrionVM Platform can be performed in a variety of ways, detailed below.
Importing Disk Images
If the disk that you wish to import is stored as a raw disk image file (e.g. img, raw) a Linux helper VM can be used to write the contents to a new Blank Disk attached to the VM.
Non-raw formatted disk file formats, such as qcow2, qed, vdi, vpc, and vmdk must be converted to raw using the qemu-image convert command available in the qemu-utils package.
You can then use the dd to write the contents of the image to the blank disk.
We recommend you use this process for Linux/Unix-like VMs as well as data disks.
Import Example
To import a data disk of format vmdk called data.vmdk to the OrionVM Platform, you first spin up a Ubuntu helper VM with public internet access, and copy data.vmdk to the home directory.
To convert to raw you must first install qemu-utils:
$ sudo apt-get install qemu-utils -y
You should now be able to use the qemu-image convert command to convert the file to raw. More details on how to use this command can be found here.
$ qemu-img convert -f vmdk -O raw data.vmdk data.img
Some disk formats use what is called thin-provisioning, which means the output raw image may be larger then the input. Use the following command to get the size of the raw image:
$ ls -hal data.img
-rw-rw-r-- 1 user user 10G Nov 28 14:35 data.img
Attach a disk of the appropriate size to the VM using the OrionVM Portal, then use the dd command to write the raw image to disk.
dd if=data.img of=/dev/xvdb status=progress
In this case, the if parameter is the file we wish to write to disk, while the of parameter is the Linux path of the disk we want to write too.
In most cases if you only have one additional disk attached then this will be /dev/xvdb. You can use fdisk -l to list all available disks if you are unsure.
Windows Migration Tools
For migrating Windows VMs we recommend using full image backup and restore software. The following software have been tested to work on our platform, though other options may also suitable:
Proprietary Drivers
VMs coming from other cloud platforms or on-premesis hypervisors may have proprietary drivers or software packages installed on them for compatability with their platform.
Please make sure that these are removed before the backup of the VM is created for migration. Some examples are listed below:
- Oracle Virtualbox - Oracle VM Guest Additions
- VMware ESXi/vSphere/Workstation - VMware Tools
- Citrix Hypervisor (formerly XenServer) - XenServer PV Tools
Xen PV Drivers
OrionVM Platform employs the use of Xen Windows PV Drivers for improved disk and networking performance on Windows VMs.
These will need to be installed on VMs once imported onto the platform, regardless of the method used to migrate.
To obtain a copy of the most up to date version of the Xen PV Drivers for the OrionVM Platform, please email the OrionVM Support at support@orionvm.com.