libvirt users - Jun 2014 - Re: converted VMDK disk iamge and Virtio driver

I have a CentOS 5 VM in vmware I wanted to move to work on KVM/libvirt. I used 
qemu-img to convert it to a qcow2 image, loaded virt-manager and created a new 
VM pointed at that qcow2 image.  The boot paniced when it tried to mount
the root filesystem also complaining about not being able to remount the
swap partition.

I played around and was able to get it to boot by changing the Virtual disk 
bus to IDE from Virtio.  Searched about Virtio and I got to 
http://wiki.libvirt.org/page/Virtio and ran the mkinitrd mentioned to force 
loading of the virtio_pci and virtio_blk drivers.  But upon shutting down, 
configuring the bus back to Virtio and booting it panics in the exact same 
way.

I tried again after adding virtio_blk into /etc/modprobe.conf as 
scsi_hostadapter and rerunning mkinitrd but it still fails.

Any clues what I am missing?


---------------------------------------------------------------
Paul Raines                     http://help.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu
MGH/MIT/HMS Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging
149 (2301) 13th Street     Charlestown, MA 02129	    USA





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On 06/18/2014 02:23 PM, Paul Raines wrote:
> 
> I have a CentOS 5 VM in vmware I wanted to move to work on KVM/libvirt.
> I used qemu-img to convert it to a qcow2 image, loaded virt-manager and
> created a new VM pointed at that qcow2 image.  The boot paniced when it
> tried to mount
> the root filesystem also complaining about not being able to remount the
> swap partition.
In general, converting a disk image from one hypervisor to another is
not trivial, because of things such as missing drivers and different
hardware being presented to the guest.  The virt-v2v project exists to
cover a lot of cases that you are probably overlooking in your manual
attempt; I'd recommend trying that approach:

http://libguestfs.org/virt-v2v/
> The information in this e-mail is intended only for the person to whom
> it is
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-- 
Eric Blake   eblake redhat com    +1-919-301-3266
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org

virt-v2v is not an option for me as all I have are the VMDK images and
don't have the VMware software to covert to OVA first.

I really don't understand what is going wrong.  I also found 
https://access.redhat.com/site/solutions/20511 and that still doesn't
work.  Both /etc/fstab and grub.conf refer to the LABEL and not any
device name.

In the boot process I see it explicitly says it is loading virtio_blk before
the panic.  So it is like that driver just doesn't see the disk.  The
host machine is a CentOS 6 box.  Is it possible the virtio in the libvirt
for CentOS/RHEL6 is not compatiable with the virtio_blk driver in 
CentOS/RHEL5?  Either that, or something else getting loaded is causing 
interference?

-- Paul Raines (http://help.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu)



On Wed, 18 Jun 2014 4:49pm, Eric Blake wrote:
> On 06/18/2014 02:23 PM, Paul Raines wrote:
>>
>> I have a CentOS 5 VM in vmware I wanted to move to work on KVM/libvirt.
>> I used qemu-img to convert it to a qcow2 image, loaded virt-manager and
>> created a new VM pointed at that qcow2 image.  The boot paniced when it
>> tried to mount
>> the root filesystem also complaining about not being able to remount
the
>> swap partition.
>
> In general, converting a disk image from one hypervisor to another is
> not trivial, because of things such as missing drivers and different
> hardware being presented to the guest.  The virt-v2v project exists to
> cover a lot of cases that you are probably overlooking in your manual
> attempt; I'd recommend trying that approach:
>
> http://libguestfs.org/virt-v2v/
>
>> The information in this e-mail is intended only for the person to whom
>> it is
>> addressed. If you believe this e-mail was sent to you in error and the
>> e-mail
>
> This disclaimer is unenforceable on a publicly-archived mailing list.
> You might want to consider using a personal email account rather than
> spamming the list with your employer's bogus legalese.
>
> -- 
> Eric Blake   eblake redhat com    +1-919-301-3266
> Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org
>
>

The information in this e-mail is intended only for the person to whom it is
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contains patient information, please contact the Partners Compliance HelpLine at
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but does not contain patient information, please contact the sender and properly
dispose of the e-mail.