Cloud Migration(VMWare to AWS)

We have heard of technologies like vMotion(VM instances can move between the host, example: VMWare virtual instances managed from vCenter can be moved from one ESXi into another).

But what if we have to move Virtual Machine instance from one platform to another

• OVF(Open Virtual Format) to AMI(Amazon Machine Image)
• VHD(Citrix Xen) to OVF or AMI
• etc..

 www.ravellosystems.com/benefits/vmware-workloads-in-aws

I came across a supposed to be COOL tool to handle this (not free, but with a cost)

List of Virtual Image Formats

Raw

The "raw" image format is the simplest one, and is natively supported by both KVM and Xen hypervisors. You can think of a raw image as being the bit-equivalent of a block device file, created as if somebody had copied, say, /dev/sda to a file using the dd command.

	Note
	We don't recommend creating raw images by dd'ing block device files, we discuss how to create raw images later.

 qcow2

The qcow2 (QEMU copy-on-write version 2) format is commonly used with the KVM hypervisor. It has some additional features over the raw format, such as:

• Using sparse representation, so the image size is smaller
• Support for snapshots

Because qcow2 is sparse, it's often faster to convert a raw image to qcow2 and upload it then to upload the raw file.

	Note
	Because raw images don't support snapshots, OpenStack Compute will automatically convert raw image files to qcow2 as needed.

 

AMI/AKI/ARI

The AMI/AKI/ARI format was the initial image format supported by Amazon EC2. The image consists of three files:

AMI (Amazon Machine Image)

This is a virtual machine image in raw format, as described above.

AKI (Amazon Kernel Image)

A kernel file that the hypervisor will load initially to boot the image. For a Linux machine, this would be a vmlinuz file.

ARI (Amazon Ramdisk Image)

An optional ramdisk file mounted at boot time. For a Linux machine, this would be an initrd file.

 UEC tarball

A UEC (Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud) tarball is a gzipped tarfile that contains an AMI file, AKI file, and ARI file.

	Note
	Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud refers to a discontinued Eucalyptus-based Ubuntu cloud solution that has been replaced by the OpenStack-based Ubuntu Cloud Infrastructure.

 VMDK

VMWare's ESXi hypervisor uses the VMDK (Virtual Machine Disk) format for images.

 VDI

VirtualBox uses the VDI (Virtual Disk Image) format for image files. None of the OpenStack Compute hypervisors support VDI directly, so you will need to convert these files to a different format to use them with OpenStack.

 VHD

Microsoft Hyper-V uses the VHD (Virtual Hard Disk) format for images..

 VHDX

The version of Hyper-V that ships with Microsoft Server 2012 uses the newer VHDX format, which has some additional features over VHD such as support for larger disk sizes and protection against data corruption during power failures.

 OVF

OVF (Open Virtualization Format) is a packaging format for virtual machines, defined by the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) standards group. An OVF package contains one or more image files, a .ovf XML metadata file that contains information about the virtual machine, and possibly other files as well.
An OVF package can be distributed in different ways. For example, it could be distributed as a set of discrete files, or as a tar archive file with an .ova (open virtual appliance/application) extension.
OpenStack Compute does not currently have support for OVF packages, so you will need to extract the image file(s) from an OVF package if you wish to use it with OpenStack.

 ISO

The ISO format is a disk image formatted with the read-only ISO 9660 (also known as ECMA-119) filesystem commonly used for CDs and DVDs. While we don't normally think of ISO a virtual machine image format, since ISOs contain bootable filesystems with an installed operating system, you can treat them the same you treat other virtual machine image files.