libvirt users - Feb 2015 - A problem with converting an OVA appliance

Hi all,

I've been having a problem when trying to convert an Open Virtualization
Appliance (OVA) format appliance to the "virt-image" format. This is
how
I try to convert the appliance:

$ virt-convert --arch=i686 -i ovf appliance.ova 

The result is:

ERROR    Couldn't import file "appliance.ova": must be string
without
null bytes or None, not str


This happens on a Debian Wheezy (7.8) machine. virt-convert is at
version 0.600.1. All libvirt* packages are at version 1.2.9. 

Unfortunately, I couldn't find anyone else through web searches having
the same issue and then applying their solution. It'd be great if
someone can help with trying to figure out what is going on here...


-- 
Regards,
Marko
http://dimjasevic.net/marko

On 02/22/2015 01:58 AM, Marko Dimjašević wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I've been having a problem when trying to convert an Open
Virtualization
> Appliance (OVA) format appliance to the "virt-image" format. This
is how
> I try to convert the appliance:
> 
> $ virt-convert --arch=i686 -i ovf appliance.ova 
> 
> The result is:
> 
> ERROR    Couldn't import file "appliance.ova": must be string
without
> null bytes or None, not str
> 
> 
> This happens on a Debian Wheezy (7.8) machine. virt-convert is at
> version 0.600.1. All libvirt* packages are at version 1.2.9. 
> 
> Unfortunately, I couldn't find anyone else through web searches having
> the same issue and then applying their solution. It'd be great if
> someone can help with trying to figure out what is going on here...
> 
> 
0.600.1 is very old, and virt-convert has changed a lot since then. I'd
recommend trying the latest version from virt-manager-1.1.0, and if you still
hit issues, file an upstream bug:

http://virt-manager.org/bugs/#report

- Cole

On Sun, 2015-02-22 at 10:33 -0500, Cole Robinson wrote:
> 0.600.1 is very old, and virt-convert has changed a lot since then. I'd
> recommend trying the latest version from virt-manager-1.1.0, and if you
still
> hit issues, file an upstream bug:
I did just that, i.e. I used virt-convert 0.600.4 from
virt-manager-1.1.0 (while I left the installed libvirt packages at
1.2.9) and the same issue happens again.

I'm puzzled. Does this mean no one uses virt-convert to convert from OVA
to virt-image?

I know it's not the problem in the virtual appliance because I can
extract its disk image and convert it to qcow2 with:

qemu-img convert -f vmdk -O qcow2 appliance.vmdk appliance.qcow2

and then create a virtual machine by providing the converted disk and
things work normally. But I'd like to avoid this workaround if possible.


-- 
Regards,
Marko
http://dimjasevic.net/marko