Looking to boot a .OVA (Virtual Box image)

[pyrater]

Has anyone done this? Is it possible? If not is it possible to convert it to a .img and boot it that way?

 

I know that a OVA file is nothing more than a TAR file, containing the .OVF and .VMDK file.... So i am not sure the correct method to do this; and i REALLY do not want to rebuild this image from scratch.

 

Would it be as simple as the web describes?

 

$ tar xvf MyAppliance.ova

$ qemu-img convert -O qcow2 MyAppliance-disk1.vmdk MyAppliance.qcow2

 

[jonp]

Has anyone done this? Is it possible? If not is it possible to convert it to a .img and boot it that way?

 

I know that a OVA file is nothing more than a TAR file, containing the .OVF and .VMDK file.... So i am not sure the correct method to do this; and i REALLY do not want to rebuild this image from scratch.

 

Would it be as simple as the web describes?

 

$ tar xvf MyAppliance.ova

$ qemu-img convert -O qcow2 MyAppliance-disk1.vmdk MyAppliance.qcow2

 

If this is a Linux-based guest, it should be that simple.  If it's Windows, you'll have to follow some additional steps to load the virtual drivers as I demonstrate in this video with a VMWare Windows VM:

 

[pyrater]

Thanx JonP ! I will post the steps that I used to this thread if successful for others.

[Timbiotic]

Thanx JonP ! I will post the steps that I used to this thread if successful for others.

 

Did you have any luck? I have ova file (Cisco virtual WLC) I'd like to run in unraid and have been using the virtual box plugin until recently when the plugin died.

[krunktor]

Bump.. Anyone have any success with OVA files?

[harshl]

The following two commands worked perfect for me. The only change I made is to output to a raw format as that was my desire for this workload.

 

$ tar xvf MyAppliance.ova
$ qemu-img convert -O raw MyAppliance-disk1.vmdk MyAppliance.img

 

I had need to boot an appliance that is only offered through an OVA format. Decompressed and converted the image with the commands above (using the proper names of course), then created a VM assigning no disks to it through the regular setup process, but editing other hardware as required. After that, I created the directory for the VM disk in my desired location and moved the converted raw image disk file over. I then edited the XML and added the disk using the following syntax, again, referencing the proper file names that I had chosen.

 

    <disk type='file' device='disk'>
      <driver name='qemu' type='raw' cache='writeback'/>
      <source file='/mnt/user/vms/MyApplianceName/vdisk1.img'/>
      <target dev='hdc' bus='virtio'/>
      <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x05' function='0x0'/>
    </disk>

 

Booted perfectly and seems to be working great. Thanks for getting me started with this thread! Hopefully this helps others as well.

[icemansid]

On 5/15/2016 at 7:43 PM, Timbiotic said:

 

Did you have any luck? I have ova file (Cisco virtual WLC) I'd like to run in unraid and have been using the virtual box plugin until recently when the plugin died.

 

Did you ever get this done? I am attempting the same thing.