Import existing VM into Openstack/Cloudstack

Question

We're currently running our infrastructure with XEN + CentOS and are thinking to make the move to Ubuntu (Both as Host and Guest) + KVM.

Our objective is to, at a later stage, create a private cloud using openstack/cloudstack however due to strict budgets we can't invest on the hardware needed to setup the cloud infrastructure alongside our current one. Since we have less than 10 Physical servers (yet with quite a few VM's) our idea was to migrate machines one by one from our current setup to the KVM+Ubuntu, my question here is the following, once we have the full kvm+Ubuntu infrastructure running, will we be able to "cloudify" it without having to rebuild all the machines (somehow import kvm guests to instances on openstack/cloudstack)? Or do we really need to build the cloud first?

Why the shift from CentOS to Ubuntu? Because aparently one needs to reinstall machines from scratch on major version upgrades (Say Centos 5 to 6), as you can imagine this is not ideal having to do every few years (specially when we will be scaling our infrastructure greatly in the future).

Both Dom0 and DomU's would be managed by puppet. Thanks for any suggestions

Solution

OpenStack does not have any built-in support for taking a running instance that was created outside of OpenStack and adding it so that it is managed by OpenStack.

However, you can export your running KVM/Xen instance as an image file, and then import the image file into OpenStack.

Comments

[Laoneo]

I know the virt command already. The question is if it is possible to import this existing VM's into openstack or cloudstack?

[David Corsalini]

a quick google reveals docs.openstack.org/trunk/openstack-compute/admin/content/…

[Laoneo]

I was probably searching with closed eyes....thanks for the link!! I'm happy that the solution is so easy.

[Laoneo]

I was reading your link but my use case is different. What I need is to import the virtual machine from a non openstack environment into openstack (not only to create an image). The link you provided is to create an image from an existing virtual machine in openstack. I'm an absolutely newbie with openstack, perhaps I'm not understanding the image functionality of openstack the right way.

[David Corsalini]

I don't see an import function for a VM as such, however, I've seen it mentioned that Nova has an "import" feature, that supports OVF. If your VMs are prepared to run on the platform in question, you can write the OVF for them manually, and import the VMs that way.

[Laoneo]

I've asked the same question on the openstack forum as future reference forums.openstack.org/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1350

[Laoneo]

As far as I understood the image functionality of openstack it works as a kind of template, or? Which means I have to create 10 images for my 10 running vm's which are all based on the same template when we created them months ago.....hmmmmm not really what I had in mind. So it looks like I have to recreate the running vms and move the data. This I wanted to avoid :-)

[Laoneo]

Xen removed the auoboot feature in version 6 which we use on our applicanes. There are also other reasons why we want to move to kvm. Is an image in openstack not a kind of template?

[Laoneo]

Thanks for your explanation. The problem is that we have our virtualized infrastructure already and want move on with it to a cloud infrastructure based on kvm and openstack.