KVM: Importing an OVA appliance

Gregg

You may or may not be aware if it, but an OVA file is just a tar archive containing an .ovf and a .vmdk files, respectively the VM configuration and disk.

$ ls *.ova HTAOE.ova $ tar tf HTAOE.ova HTAOE.ovf HTAOE-disk001.vmdk HTAOE.mf

So, you can simply extract the files:

$ tar xvf HTAOE.ova

And convert to a format appropriate for QEMU/KVM:

List the available formats

$ qemu-img -h | tail -n4 Supported formats: blkdebug blklogwrites blkverify bochs cloop compress copy-before-write copy-on-read dmg file ftp ftps host_cdrom host_device http https luks nbd null-aio null-co nvme parallels preallocate qcow qcow2 qed quorum raw replication ssh throttle vdi vhdx vmdk vpc vvfat See <https://qemu.org/contribute/report-a-bug> for how to report bugs. More information on the QEMU project at <https://qemu.org>.

Do the actual conversion (I chose qcow2 here)

$ qemu-img convert -O qcow2 HTAOE.vmdk HTAOE.qcow2

Have a look at the .ovf too, for information on expected machine configuration, resources (eg. memory and cpu), etc.

After the conversion, simply create a new VM and make it use the newly created disk as the primary disk.