vbox to vmware

S

stanj

n00b
Joined
Jul 10, 2012
Messages
10
We are looking at moving from Oracle to VMware on a production system.

We need to convert two Oracle Virtual Box VMs.
One Oracle Virtual Box VM is running RedHat Linux 5.5 the other Oracle Virtual Box VM is Windows 2003 Server.

We are looking at vSphere 5 Essentials as the software.

Will VMware Converter 5.0 be able to convert the Oracle Virtual Box VMs to run on ESXi 5?

If so, how much down time can be expected when the Oracle Virtual Box VMs are converted to ESXi 5.0?

If Converter is not an option, what method can be used?

thanks
 
What file format are the Oracle files in? I assume VHD but I just wanted to check.
 
Downtime... Do your boxes constantly write new data, or are they more like web servers where it's mostly reading? (Would you be able to make a copy of them, and convert it, power it up on the new server, and do a changeover, or would you have to stop everything before you could start the conversion process?) The best I can suggest to you is see if you can make a live copy of your VMs, or schedule a downtime to turn them off and make a copy. Without knowing how big they are, what kind of network you might want to move them across, what kind of controllers and hardware you are using, it could be anywhere from 30 seconds to 30 hours.

Once you have a copy of them you are no longer pressed for time and can transfer those copies to a testing server to get an idea of how long it might take just to move the files. Then if you find a conversion process you can try to power them up and make sure that everything came up correctly. Best case you might need to fix your network adapters, worse case the VM kernel panics because it doesn't like the drive controller it was put on. You probably don't want to schedule a 4 hour maintenance window under the assumption that someone said it only took them 2 hours to do the process.
 
VMWare Converter will convert any powered-on machine, even if it's a VM. So you just fire the converter up, point it to the powered-on VM and tell it to convert it to an ESX guest (Normally you have the host up and running, and tell it which host to put it on right away). There is no need for downtime, it can convert it with it being on and used (it will take longer, of course this way), and you can set it to sync any changes made to the powered-on machine after the initial conversion is done as well. The Converter is free too, so you can go download it now and do a test run just to see how long it'll take with no ill effect on anything.
one.png


one.png
two.png

one.png
two.png

two.png
three.png
three.png

three.png
 
Last edited:
The conversion will have to occur within a few hrs during a scheduled maintenance window.
I am trying to get a copy of the VMs that from a back up to use as test VMs to work out a procedure.

The VMs are not that large and we are on a 1 gb network.
I have used converter 4 and the enterprise version as well.

I have been seeing messages about issues with converting Vbox to ESXi even if converter is used,,

Something about rearrangement of the elements because Virtual Box writes them in somewhat random order..

Has anyone used Converter 5 to convert a vbox VM to a vSphere ESXi 5 VM?
 
Ok,
I will review this info and I also have heard back from VMware that 5.0 converter will work.
Time will tell once I set up the test system.

Now, I was going to install vbox 4.1-4.1.18 on the RHEL 6.0.

The files are a .rpm. I have seen posting that it is not a straight forward install that there may be additional files required.

I am not a UNIX expert, so I am not sure on what may be missing on Linux RHEL 6.0.

I do not see an rpm install in the vbox installation section.

What is the command to install vbox on RHEL6?

thanks
 
i am attempting the install of Vbox on RHEL6.

I get the following errors when I try to install with rpm..
I am not a UNIX person...Do I need to install something prior to installing Vbox?

VirtualBox-4.1-4.1.18_78361_rhel6-1.i686 requires libxml2.so.2(LIBXML2_2.6.0)
VirtualBox-4.1-4.1.18_78361_rhel6-1.i686 requires libstdc++.so.6(CXXABI_1.3)
VirtualBox-4.1-4.1.18_78361_rhel6-1.i686 requires libSDL-1.2.so.0
VirtualBox-4.1-4.1.18_78361_rhel6-1.i686 requires libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.2.3)
VirtualBox-4.1-4.1.18_78361_rhel6-1.i686 requires libm.so.6(GLIBC_2.0)
VirtualBox-4.1-4.1.18_78361_rhel6-1.i686 requires libXext.so.6
VirtualBox-4.1-4.1.18_78361_rhel6-1.i686 requires libz.so.1
VirtualBox-4.1-4.1.18_78361_rhel6-1.i686 requires libstdc++.so.6
VirtualBox-4.1-4.1.18_78361_rhel6-1.i686 requires libxml2.so.2(LIBXML2_2.6.17)
VirtualBox-4.1-4.1.18_78361_rhel6-1.i686 requires libxml2.so.2(LIBXML2_2.6.8)
VirtualBox-4.1-4.1.18_78361_rhel6-1.i686 requires libpthread.so.0(GLIBC_2.1)
VirtualBox-4.1-4.1.18_78361_rhel6-1.i686 requires libpthread.so.0
VirtualBox-4.1-4.1.18_78361_rhel6-1.i686 requires libcurl.so.4
VirtualBox-4.1-4.1.18_78361_rhel6-1.i686 requires libXcursor.so.1
VirtualBox-4.1-4.1.18_78361_rhel6-1.i686 r...
 
Yes, you need to make sure you have those packages up to date. If you're installing on RHEL/CentOS, just set up the VBox yum repo and install it that way. It will update the packages for you automatically as you install it. Instructions for adding the repo are in the last section on this wiki page:
https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Linux_Downloads

Basically just put this file in /etc/yum.repos.d/ and run:
yum install virtualbox
 
ok,
i tried yum


get these errors...

# yum install binutils gcc make patch libgomp glibc-headers glibc-devel kernel-headers kernel-devel dkms
Loaded plugins: refresh-packagekit, rhnplugin
http://kdeforge.unl.edu/mirrors/epel/5/x86_64/repodata/repomd.xml: [Errno 14] PYCURL ERROR 6 - ""
Trying other mirror.
http://mirror.seas.harvard.edu/epel/5/x86_64/repodata/repomd.xml: [Errno 14] PYCURL ERROR 6 - ""
Trying other mirror.
http://download-i2.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/5/x86_64/repodata/repomd.xml: [Errno 14] PYCURL ERROR 6 - ""
Trying other mirror.
http://mirror.chpc.utah.edu/pub/epel/5/x86_64/repodata/repomd.xml: [Errno 14] PYCURL ERROR 6 - ""
Trying other mirror.
http://mirror.unl.edu/epel/5/x86_64/repodata/repomd.xml: [Errno 14] PYCURL ERROR 6 - ""
Trying other mirror.
http://mirror.vcu.edu/pub/gnu+linux/epel/5/x86_64/repodata/repomd.xml: [Errno 14] PYCURL ERROR 6 - ""
Trying other mirror.
http://www.gtlib.gatech.edu/pub/fedora-epel/5/x86_64/repodata/repomd.xml: [Errno 14] PYCURL ERROR 6 - ""
Trying other mirror.
http://linux.mirrors.es.net/fedora-epel/5/x86_64/repodata/repomd.xml: [Errno 14] PYCURL ERROR 6 - ""
Trying other mirror.
http://mirror.umd.edu/fedora/epel/5/x86_64/repodata/repomd.xml: [Errno 14] PYCURL ERROR 6 - ""
Trying other mirror.
http://archive.linux.duke.edu/pub/epel/5/x86_64/repodata/repomd.xml: [Errno 14] PYCURL ERROR 6 - ""
Trying other mirror.
http://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/fedora-epel/5/x86_64/repodata/repomd.xml: [Errno 14] PYCURL ERROR 6 - ""
Trying other mirror.
ftp://mirror.cs.princeton.edu/pub/mirrors/fedora-epel/5/x86_64/repodata/repomd.xml: [Errno 14] PYCURL ERROR 6 - ""
Trying other mirror.
http://mirrors.rit.edu/epel/5/x86_64/repodata/repomd.xml: [Errno 14] PYCURL ERROR 6 - ""
Trying other mirror.
http://mirror.cc.columbia.edu/pub/linux/epel/5/x86_64/repodata/repomd.xml: [Errno 14] PYCURL ERROR 6 - ""
Trying other mirror.
http://mirror.itc.virginia.edu/fedora-epel/5/x86_64/repodata/repomd.xml: [Errno 14] PYCURL ERROR 6 - ""
Trying other mirror.
http://ftp.linux.ncsu.edu/pub/epel/5/x86_64/repodata/repomd.xml: [Errno 14] PYCURL ERROR 6 - ""
Trying other mirror.
Error: Cannot retrieve repository metadata (repomd.xml) for repository: epel. Please verify its path and try again
 
You have a problem with your yum configuration or something. Try "yum clean all" and then "yum update"
 
I moved all of the pkgs out of yum.repos.d to a temp folder and ran the clean all
#yum clean all
Loaded plugins: refresh-packagekit, rhnplugin
Cleaning up Everything


Ran this to retrieve the virtualbox.repo file
# rpm -Uhv http://128.241.187.63/pub/rhn-org-trusted-ssl-cert-1.0-1.noarch.rpm

# ls /etc/yum.repos.d
virtualbox.repo

Ran this to retrieve the EPEL repository
# rpm -Uvh http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm

Retrieving http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm
warning: /var/tmp/rpm-tmp.joMH3I: Header V3 DSA/SHA1 Signature, key ID 217521f6: NOKEY
Preparing... ########################################### [100%]
package epel-release-5-4.noarch is already installed

tried to install EPEL repository


# yum install binutils gcc make patch libgomp glibc-headers glibc-devel kernel-headers kernel-devel dkms
Loaded plugins: refresh-packagekit, rhnplugin
Error: Cannot retrieve repository metadata (repomd.xml) for repository: epel6_x86-64. Please verify its path and try again
 
as a test, i removed the repos file and did a

yum clean all.
then, executed,
yum update yum

and get the error,,

Loaded plugins: refresh-packagekit, rhnplugin
Error: Cannot retrieve repository metadata (repomd.xml) for repository: epel6_x86-64. Please verify its path and try again
 
stanj said:
Loaded plugins: refresh-packagekit, rhnplugin
Error: Cannot retrieve repository metadata (repomd.xml) for repository: epel6_x86-64. Please verify its path and try again
Click to expand...

There's something wrong with your configuration that I'm unable to diagnose at this point. That error is just caused by yum not being able to retrieve repo metadata at a specified path. It can be caused by general network problems of some sort or improper configuration. Your last error was caused by yum trying to find a RHEL 6-compatible metadata file in a RHEL 5-compatible repo, which does not exist. If you installed EPEL 6, that error should be gone, but it's not clear from your post. Have you tried getting what you need without EPEL installed? You don't need EPEL for VirtualBox, AFAIK.
 
EPEL is erased (deleted)

#rpm -e epel-release-6-7.noarch

still get the error,,,

since his is a test, I may reinstall RHEL6..

i
 
ok,

i installed RHEL6 x64 on a VM,,

i issue

# yum list

get this error...

Cannot retrieve repository metadata (repomd.xml) for repository: rhel-x86_64-server-6. Please verify its path and try again
 
ok,
i koved up to RHEL6.2 and get further,,
some issue with DKMS..

i tried on RHEL6.2 and get further..

but DKMS is not installed?



Running Transaction
Installing : VirtualBox-4.1-4.1.18_78361_rhel6-1.x86_64 1/1
Creating group 'vboxusers'. VM users must be member of that group!
No precompiled module for this kernel found -- trying to build one. Messages
emitted during module compilation will be logged to /var/log/vbox-install.log.
Stopping VirtualBox kernel modules [ OK ]
Uninstalling old VirtualBox DKMS kernel modules [ OK ]
Trying to register the VirtualBox kernel modules using DKMS [FAILED]
(Failed, trying without DKMS)
Recompiling VirtualBox kernel modules [ OK ]
Starting VirtualBox kernel modules [ OK ]
Installed products updated.
Verifying : VirtualBox-4.1-4.1.18_78361_rhel6-1.x86_64 1/1
Installed:
VirtualBox-4.1.x86_64 0:4.1.18_78361_rhel6-1
Complete!

# yum install dkms

Loaded plugins: product-id, refresh-packagekit, rhnplugin, security,

: subscription-manager

Updating certificate-based repositories.
Unable to read consumer identity
Setting up Install Process
No package dkms available.
Error: Nothing to do





# /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup

Stopping VirtualBox kernel modules [ OK ]
Uninstalling old VirtualBox DKMS kernel modules [ OK ]
Removing old VirtualBox pci kernel module [ OK ]
Removing old VirtualBox netadp kernel module [ OK ]
Removing old VirtualBox netflt kernel module [ OK ]
Removing old VirtualBox kernel module [ OK ]
Trying to register the VirtualBox kernel modules using DKMS[FAILED]

(Failed, trying without DKMS)

Recompiling VirtualBox kernel modules [ OK ]
Starting VirtualBox kernel modules [ OK

#
 
Don't worry about DKMS. I'm not sure what's causing the issues, but are you really going to be upgrading the kernel that often on a server distro? If you do update the kernel, just reinstall VBox and it will build the kernel modules again.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top