This was extremely helpful, i managed to import my esxi disk from a locally mounted read only share with the command you gave. it literally brought a tear to my eye to see it boot up after following your instructions and everything worked perfectly :)
Man you saved me!! I used this method to restore my Open Media Vault. I wanted to dissolve my proxmox cluster and proxmox got confused with the bootable system of the OMV. Then I found the qcow2 file in the depths of my proxmox and with your help I could make it work again. A big thank you!!!
Thanks for this video. It answered many questions for me to convert a pile of my stored vm disks into Proxmox. Awaiting for your new videos and happy holidays.
Thank you for this tried this many times in the past with 0 luck. Worked 100% this time, 1 key option is a lot of places tend to forget is the boot assignment and I think that's why I've always failed. I Love proxmox it is great for a home lab or even enterprise and can be run on an old dell optiplex with tones of ram (points at self) no need for expensive hardware
Thanks for the short and very helpful video. Lot's of VMWare Workstation vmdk's to import so hopefully I will be able to use this method to get everything added!
This was great thanks, in my case I hosted my vmdk on my NAS via SMB. I ls to /mnt/pve/NAS and run my import cmd from there. Worked great without having to SCP upload to the local storage.
Blogger, your videos are great and help me learn a lot about Linux technology. I have come across a new idea now, and I think it may help many Linux users. This idea is how to implement the ghost function similar to window on Linux after we have deployed the environment and software in Linux, which can be quickly batched Install the system on the new computer. I'm very sorry that my English is not very good so I don't know if I have expressed my question clearly. Would love to hear back from admirers!
In the past I've copied vmware vmdk files over to ProxMox and then convert them to COW2 format. Create the VM including storage. Then copy (overwrite) the converted cow2 file directly to that vm's disk. Don't worry about the disk size when creating the vm. ProxMox will automatically match whatever the cow2 file says. I had to carefully keep track which VM I was overwriting the disks so I don't wipe out the wrong VM. The steps in the video is a bit easier. I wish ProxMox have a VM import wizard for OVA files.
qm importdisk is that (for disks) plus qm importovf (for the config), but nothing to deal with the OVA as a whole and not a GUI. It would be nice to expose these to the GUI.
@@apalrdsadventures I have a problem when importing the disk. The VM running on VmWare with full version OS. When I importing OVA n WMDK to Proxmox, the OS need new key. wkwkwk
@@supernoob5217 it always will. There is no way to move a windows machine between VMs while keeping it active. If that were allowed people could create endless number of Windows VMs with 1 key.
could you demo how we can send audio from a Windows guest to host? specifically, maybe using pulseaudio or JACK? Passthrough seems to have a lot of issues with crackling and latency
I downloaded the cisco security workstation for networking tutorials, and when I extracted it with the tar -xvf command, I got 2 vmdk files. any idea why that happens and what to do about it. I'm pretty sure I've seen this before, and never figured out how to use it. Thanks again for these great proxmox tutorials! edit: I figured it out, just imported both disks and that worked.
@@apalrdsadventures A HTTP /TCP load balancer. I recently installed kemp just to learn more about load balancing. I know a lot of routers have it built in but it's great to get hands on. Here in the UK with have on 56 Megabyte download VDSL. So, I'm playing around with ways to prioritise certain traffic and Vlan's. Great videos I always check your channel. I've built some great virtualisation rigs with mini pcs. I was able to use it in my thesis. regards Alex
To mix Pimox and Proxmox in a full cluster, or just to use a Pi for quorum of 2 Proxmox nodes? I have a video on the second topic ("SMALL Proxmox Cluster Tips") but not the first.
I have a problem when importing the disk. The VM running on VmWare with full version OS. When I importing OVA n WMDK to Proxmox, the OS need new key. wkwkwk
@@apalrdsadventures I used Mikrotik RouterOS for networking management. This is the ova file drive.google.com/file/d/1ll-9FFZV7oI7OyfklayxDfGboun2EQqK/view
RouterOS is licensed to the system's UUID and HDD UUID, which changes in a new environment, so you need to un-license it while it's still in ESXi, then move it, then re-license it.
I'm not sure what the import process is like for Hyper-V, but if you want Proxmox to generate a new vm image (raw / vmdk / qcow2) for you, here's a bit of a trick: * Mount a smb share from Windows as a storage in Proxmox, go to datacenter - > storage -> add -> smb/cifs, make sure to enable at least vm disks on the storage. * Clone the VM (presumably with it shut down), do a full clone with the target as your new smb share, this is where your disk image will end up. Proxmox will convert whatever format the VM is in currently to the new format and put the new copy on your samba share. Do not start the clone VM, just leave it. * Copy the file out of the file-based storage. You now have the disk image which you can import into Hyper-V. It will be in a subfolder that Proxmox created on your smb share and named something like vm-xxx-disk-0. There may be multiple disks. If you are using UEFI, check in the gui under the VM -> hardware to see which disk is the EFI disk and discard the image file for that disk. * Delete the clone, which will delete the new copy and any records Proxmox has of the process
There are a few ways to do this. The simplest way is to shutdown the VM and clone it onto a storage which is file-based that you can easily access (i.e. NFS/SMB). Then you can copy the files and delete the clone.
To bad it doesn't support OVA (Appliance), as it would then be dead easy to import (and export) virtual machines with other hypervisor software, like VB etc.
Sorry - stupid questions from my end: 1) How did you create the "local_zfs" storage pool? (Pardon me if I am not using the correct terminology to refer to the objects.) 2) What does the "discard" option when you were setting up the imported disk means?
Proxmox creates local_zfs automatically when you install via zfs. The other option is local_lvm if you installed using any other file system, or any storage you setup yourself after installation. Discard means the disk supports the discard / trim command, allowing the underling storage (zfs in this case) to only store data which is used by the vm, assuming the vm also supports discard / trim support - its widely supported on recent OSes since SSDs make use of it. Definitely good to enable on all VMs. You might not be able to use virtio scsi or virtio block on windows VMs since they don’t have drivers out of the box, so using sata is usually a good choice there.
@@apalrdsadventures "Proxmox creates local_zfs automatically when you install via zfs." Ahhh....I didn't know that. I think that in my test system right now (a HP Z420 workstation), I think that I might have installed it using LVM. re: discard/trim I am guessing that if you are using HDDs, that enabling this wouldn't really help since HDDs doesn't support discard/trim commands? I have a TrueNAS Core server that is running ZFS. Would I still be able to use the block device/level of access if it is a remote ZFS zpool or would I have to create an iSCSI target (in order to be able to get that block device access) (that you're able to get with the local ZFS install)? Thank you, once again, for answering my dumb questions. This is very helpful!
A few things: - If you installed with any option except zfs you should have local-lvm instead of local-zfs, and it should work reasonably similarly to zfs (although zfs is better at most things). - Discard/Trim is still useful for zfs / lvm / qcow storage even with HDDs, since the storage is thin provisioned - zfs, lvm, ... only stores the blocks which are actually used by the VM, so the total space the VMs use can be larger than the space available. -If you want to store data on TrueNAS, the easiest way is to export an NFS share and save your VMs using qcow2 files for block storage. If you use iSCSI, you will have to create an export in TrueNAS, and then Proxmox will create an LVM pool on top of a single iscsi pool, it won't create new zfs zvols for each VM.
@@apalrdsadventures Thank you for your quick responses. Yes, I have a local-lvm storage "thing" (not sure what the proper terminology for it, but yes, it does say local-lvm). re: discard on HDD with qcow2 Good to know. re: NFS share on TrueNAS My understanding is that with that kind of a deployment, NFS share would be file-based storage rather than block-based storage, correct? I am not sure if I would be able to use the iSCSI target for multiple, thin provisioned VMs because if say, I create a 10 TB iSCSI target, and then I create a VM where the disk for the VM is 1 TB, my understanding is that even if the VM's disk is thin provisioned for 1 TB (i.e. initially maybe only taking upwards of 50 GB), my thinking is that I still won't be able to overlap another VM disk on top of that because on the TrueNAS iSCSI backend, it will think that 1 TB has been thick provisioned, even if the VM is actually, in reality, thin provisioned. Please correct me and educate me if the way I am thinking about this is not precise nor accurate. (The problem that I am running into is that my HP Z420 workstation only has a 1 TB SSD in it, and I am wanting to load about 10 VMs to test, and each VM will take about 1 TB (they're going to be imported from Oracle VirtualBox OVAs). Therefore; I can't host those VMs locally, and will need to host them on my TrueNAS server. This, in turn, is driving me to think about whether I want to set up the NFS share (which is pretty easy to do) and then let it be file-based storage vs. being able to give it block-level access (albeit over GbE, it's effectively irrelevant). So...that's the background behind my question.) Thank you.
Absolutely brilliant! No BS, just straight forward instructions. Thank you
This was extremely helpful, i managed to import my esxi disk from a locally mounted read only share with the command you gave. it literally brought a tear to my eye to see it boot up after following your instructions and everything worked perfectly :)
Thank you so much, this is exactly what I was looking for, direct to the point, no unnecessary explanations, very clear and precise. Works like charm.
Man you saved me!! I used this method to restore my Open Media Vault.
I wanted to dissolve my proxmox cluster and proxmox got confused with the bootable system of the OMV. Then I found the qcow2 file in the depths of my proxmox and with your help I could make it work again.
A big thank you!!!
Thanks for this video. It answered many questions for me to convert a pile of my stored vm disks into Proxmox. Awaiting for your new videos and happy holidays.
Glad you liked it! It's a pretty simple process but there's unfortunately no GUI for it
I keep finding your videos when googling some random problem I'm having, and you're really helpful! Subscribing this time to skip the Google step!
Thanks a lot buddy! Really perfect and simple to follow tutorial. Exactly what I was looking for. Merry Christmas and Happy New year!
Glad you liked it!
Thank you for this tried this many times in the past with 0 luck. Worked 100% this time, 1 key option is a lot of places tend to forget is the boot assignment and I think that's why I've always failed. I Love proxmox it is great for a home lab or even enterprise and can be run on an old dell optiplex with tones of ram (points at self) no need for expensive hardware
Proxmox is definitely a great tool!
Thanks for the short and very helpful video. Lot's of VMWare Workstation vmdk's to import so hopefully I will be able to use this method to get everything added!
Awesome explanation and guidance. Thanks bro
you saved me hours , and very straight to the point and no bs video, thansk for that
Nice and thank you for the original and useful content!
Thank you so much for the very useful tutorial, much appreciated , wish you good luck & please keep the good work
Thank You!! This seems to be what I needed to learn to take those Qemu VM's off my Quest 2 and onto Pi 4 Proxmox. Your the best Happy Thanksgiving.
Excellent, I appreciate the details, it was really helpful to get me to import the OVA virtual box images from an older server 🙏all the very best.
Glad it helped!
Thank you very much for the time you dedicate in making super useful videos like this one! greetings from Italy.
This was great thanks, in my case I hosted my vmdk on my NAS via SMB. I ls to /mnt/pve/NAS and run my import cmd from there. Worked great without having to SCP upload to the local storage.
Blogger, your videos are great and help me learn a lot about Linux technology. I have come across a new idea now, and I think it may help many Linux users. This idea is how to implement the ghost function similar to window on Linux after we have deployed the environment and software in Linux, which can be quickly batched Install the system on the new computer. I'm very sorry that my English is not very good so I don't know if I have expressed my question clearly. Would love to hear back from admirers!
In the past I've copied vmware vmdk files over to ProxMox and then convert them to COW2 format. Create the VM including storage. Then copy (overwrite) the converted cow2 file directly to that vm's disk. Don't worry about the disk size when creating the vm. ProxMox will automatically match whatever the cow2 file says. I had to carefully keep track which VM I was overwriting the disks so I don't wipe out the wrong VM. The steps in the video is a bit easier. I wish ProxMox have a VM import wizard for OVA files.
qm importdisk is that (for disks) plus qm importovf (for the config), but nothing to deal with the OVA as a whole and not a GUI. It would be nice to expose these to the GUI.
@@apalrdsadventures I have a problem when importing the disk. The VM running on VmWare with full version OS.
When I importing OVA n WMDK to Proxmox, the OS need new key. wkwkwk
@@supernoob5217 it always will. There is no way to move a windows machine between VMs while keeping it active. If that were allowed people could create endless number of Windows VMs with 1 key.
Awesome! Worked out great.
Super useful, thanks a ton
Excellent tutorial.
Glad you liked it!
you saved me alot of time .thanks man
Cat learning linux slow and arduous but your videos are great! Cheers
Thanks! Btw you don't have to extract the ova. You can import ova directly via the same qm importdisk command.
This is not true, at least for the ova I tried I did have to extract it first
Just a quick note "proxmox isn't gonna be able to read ovf"
A command in the documentation, on the next line down "qm importovf "
Thanks for this video!
I'ts was very helpfull.
God Bless. You're really good.
Thank you very much for your great help
Glad it helped!
Thanks so much for the video. Are you thinking about making your own merch?
I don't really have any designs yet. I'm not particularly good at drawing/art, so I'd need to work with an artist.
@@apalrdsadventures well someday I’m sure.
Thanks a lot this had worked. I have used --format qcow2 to get qcow2 format not raw.
thanks dude
could you demo how we can send audio from a Windows guest to host? specifically, maybe using pulseaudio or JACK? Passthrough seems to have a lot of issues with crackling and latency
thakns men its helps me a lot.
you know that you can create a diskless vm by deleting the disk during the wizard via the trash icon?
you know that you can import the ovf settings?
I am aware that you can delete the disk in the wizard.
Apalrd can you please spin up a Batocera Linux 38 Vm example and show how to import, passthru a USB Xbox controller etc?
tnx for the vid
Hello good! Could you show us how to do it from a virtual machine from the xenserver to the proxmox?
I downloaded the cisco security workstation for networking tutorials, and when I extracted it with the tar -xvf command, I got 2 vmdk files. any idea why that happens and what to do about it. I'm pretty sure I've seen this before, and never figured out how to use it. Thanks again for these great proxmox tutorials! edit: I figured it out, just imported both disks and that worked.
I could get this to work with with the qcow2 version of home assistant for some reason. Still liked the video 👍
btw, dont stop making videos
Very Well
Have you ever used a load balancer? Something like Kemp Loadmaster for Proxmox It might make a good video
Like an HTTP / TCP load balancer? Or a Proxmox cluster load balancer?
@@apalrdsadventures A HTTP /TCP load balancer. I recently installed kemp just to learn more about load balancing. I know a lot of routers have it built in but it's great to get hands on. Here in the UK with have on 56 Megabyte download VDSL. So, I'm playing around with ways to prioritise certain traffic and Vlan's. Great videos I always check your channel. I've built some great virtualisation rigs with mini pcs. I was able to use it in my thesis. regards Alex
Great guide - can you make a video about using pimox with proxmox - I have head its possible to gain 3 nodes but how will it work ?
To mix Pimox and Proxmox in a full cluster, or just to use a Pi for quorum of 2 Proxmox nodes? I have a video on the second topic ("SMALL Proxmox Cluster Tips") but not the first.
I did find your video with quorum but can pimox be the 3 node ? can you run arm app maybe sure some migration is impossible ;)@@apalrdsadventures
How about .IMG .Ive been tried to import raspbx img but still failed
Is that because it's an ARM image and not x86?
I have a problem when importing the disk. The VM running on VmWare with full version OS.
When I importing OVA n WMDK to Proxmox, the OS need new key. wkwkwk
Do you mean windows needs a new license key?
@@apalrdsadventures I used Mikrotik RouterOS for networking management. This is the ova file
drive.google.com/file/d/1ll-9FFZV7oI7OyfklayxDfGboun2EQqK/view
RouterOS is licensed to the system's UUID and HDD UUID, which changes in a new environment, so you need to un-license it while it's still in ESXi, then move it, then re-license it.
@@apalrdsadventures re license with same key/license?
Hi, can I convert a proxmox virtual machine to Microsoft hyper V?
I'm not sure what the import process is like for Hyper-V, but if you want Proxmox to generate a new vm image (raw / vmdk / qcow2) for you, here's a bit of a trick:
* Mount a smb share from Windows as a storage in Proxmox, go to datacenter - > storage -> add -> smb/cifs, make sure to enable at least vm disks on the storage.
* Clone the VM (presumably with it shut down), do a full clone with the target as your new smb share, this is where your disk image will end up. Proxmox will convert whatever format the VM is in currently to the new format and put the new copy on your samba share. Do not start the clone VM, just leave it.
* Copy the file out of the file-based storage. You now have the disk image which you can import into Hyper-V. It will be in a subfolder that Proxmox created on your smb share and named something like vm-xxx-disk-0. There may be multiple disks. If you are using UEFI, check in the gui under the VM -> hardware to see which disk is the EFI disk and discard the image file for that disk.
* Delete the clone, which will delete the new copy and any records Proxmox has of the process
Are you aware of any way to export a VM out of Proxmox to use in another hypervisor?
There are a few ways to do this. The simplest way is to shutdown the VM and clone it onto a storage which is file-based that you can easily access (i.e. NFS/SMB). Then you can copy the files and delete the clone.
To bad it doesn't support OVA (Appliance), as it would then be dead easy to import (and export) virtual machines with other hypervisor software, like VB etc.
There have to be an easier way to do this, too much...
Sorry - stupid questions from my end:
1) How did you create the "local_zfs" storage pool? (Pardon me if I am not using the correct terminology to refer to the objects.)
2) What does the "discard" option when you were setting up the imported disk means?
Proxmox creates local_zfs automatically when you install via zfs. The other option is local_lvm if you installed using any other file system, or any storage you setup yourself after installation.
Discard means the disk supports the discard / trim command, allowing the underling storage (zfs in this case) to only store data which is used by the vm, assuming the vm also supports discard / trim support - its widely supported on recent OSes since SSDs make use of it. Definitely good to enable on all VMs.
You might not be able to use virtio scsi or virtio block on windows VMs since they don’t have drivers out of the box, so using sata is usually a good choice there.
@@apalrdsadventures
"Proxmox creates local_zfs automatically when you install via zfs."
Ahhh....I didn't know that.
I think that in my test system right now (a HP Z420 workstation), I think that I might have installed it using LVM.
re: discard/trim
I am guessing that if you are using HDDs, that enabling this wouldn't really help since HDDs doesn't support discard/trim commands?
I have a TrueNAS Core server that is running ZFS.
Would I still be able to use the block device/level of access if it is a remote ZFS zpool or would I have to create an iSCSI target (in order to be able to get that block device access) (that you're able to get with the local ZFS install)?
Thank you, once again, for answering my dumb questions.
This is very helpful!
A few things:
- If you installed with any option except zfs you should have local-lvm instead of local-zfs, and it should work reasonably similarly to zfs (although zfs is better at most things).
- Discard/Trim is still useful for zfs / lvm / qcow storage even with HDDs, since the storage is thin provisioned - zfs, lvm, ... only stores the blocks which are actually used by the VM, so the total space the VMs use can be larger than the space available.
-If you want to store data on TrueNAS, the easiest way is to export an NFS share and save your VMs using qcow2 files for block storage. If you use iSCSI, you will have to create an export in TrueNAS, and then Proxmox will create an LVM pool on top of a single iscsi pool, it won't create new zfs zvols for each VM.
@@apalrdsadventures
Thank you for your quick responses.
Yes, I have a local-lvm storage "thing" (not sure what the proper terminology for it, but yes, it does say local-lvm).
re: discard on HDD with qcow2
Good to know.
re: NFS share on TrueNAS
My understanding is that with that kind of a deployment, NFS share would be file-based storage rather than block-based storage, correct?
I am not sure if I would be able to use the iSCSI target for multiple, thin provisioned VMs because if say, I create a 10 TB iSCSI target, and then I create a VM where the disk for the VM is 1 TB, my understanding is that even if the VM's disk is thin provisioned for 1 TB (i.e. initially maybe only taking upwards of 50 GB), my thinking is that I still won't be able to overlap another VM disk on top of that because on the TrueNAS iSCSI backend, it will think that 1 TB has been thick provisioned, even if the VM is actually, in reality, thin provisioned.
Please correct me and educate me if the way I am thinking about this is not precise nor accurate.
(The problem that I am running into is that my HP Z420 workstation only has a 1 TB SSD in it, and I am wanting to load about 10 VMs to test, and each VM will take about 1 TB (they're going to be imported from Oracle VirtualBox OVAs). Therefore; I can't host those VMs locally, and will need to host them on my TrueNAS server. This, in turn, is driving me to think about whether I want to set up the NFS share (which is pretty easy to do) and then let it be file-based storage vs. being able to give it block-level access (albeit over GbE, it's effectively irrelevant). So...that's the background behind my question.)
Thank you.