KVM: Importing an OVA appliance
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 *.ovaHTAOE.ova$ tar tf HTAOE.ovaHTAOE.ovfHTAOE-disk001.vmdkHTAOE.mf
So, you can simply extract the files:
Create a QEMU/KVM Virtual Machine from the Command Line
You can use a combination of command line tools to create and configure a virtual machine. Here we will use few tools from the QEMU and libvirt packages to do this.
Use QEMU to create a 15GB QCOW disk image:
$ qemu-img create -f qcow2 /home/user/KVM/CentOS-Stream-9.qcow2 15GFormatting '/home/user/KVM/CentOS-Stream-9.qcow2', fmt=qcow2 cluster_size=65536 extended_l2=off compression_type=zlib size=16106127360 lazy_refcounts=off refcount_bits=16
Start the installation:
$ sudo virt-install --name=CentOS-Stream-9 --vcpus=1 --memory=1024 --location=/home/user/Downloads/CentOS-Stream-9-20230704.1-x86_64-boot.iso --os-variant=centos8 --network bridge:virbr0 --disk path=/home/user/KVM/CentOS-Stream-9.qcow2 --disk size=15Password:WARNING Requested memory 1024 MiB is less than the recommended 1536 MiB for OS centos8Starting install...Retrieving 'vmlinuz' | 0 B 00:00:00 ...Retrieving 'initrd.img' | 0 B 00:00:00 ...Allocating 'CentOS-Stream-9.qcow2' | 2.5 MB 00:00:03 ...WARNING Overriding memory to 3072 MiB needed for centos8 network install.Creating domain... | 0 B 00:00:00Running graphical console command: virt-viewer --connect qemu:///system --wait CentOS-Stream-9