Copying the OVA over to the Proxmox Server
You can use any method you prefer to get the OVA over to the Proxmox server. I have a portable USB drive that I use on my home server. I download most of my ISO, OVA, and VMDK images onto the drive and then simply plug it back in. That is just convenient and what works for ME. You can do whatever YOU like. If you are copying from a Windows host WinSCP is a secure and easy route to go. A view of the console is presented in Figure 1.
WinSCP can be downloaded here:
Figure 1. Win SCP view of Windows Host and Proxmox Server
My goal was to get the “enisa-main3.ova” seen in Figure 1. to run on my PROXMOX 5 2-10 server. I imported the OVA to the “/var/lib/vz/template/iso/” directory via WinSCP. That is the directory where all of my ISO images are contained. The ISO folder is mounted to disk from a USB hard drive.
I ran the command tar with options:
- x – extract an archive file.
- v – show the progress of the archive file.
- f – filename of the archive file
Figure 2. tar command to extract the vmdk file
The output was two files – one an OVF file which contains the settings and configuration of the virtual machine and one file which was the virtual machine disk (VMDK) which are the disk images of the virtual machine.
Although you can run a VMDK file in Proxmox, it’s recommended to use qcow2 which is the default file format for Proxmox virtual machines. Run the VMDK file through the converter – note this can take a while with large files.
In the Proxmox web GUI, click on Create VM and create a VM which meets the requirements of the image you converted. Make sure that you select qcow2 for the disk format. After clicking Finish an empty VM will be created – in this example, I used local storage and VMID 801.
Or, copy vmdk over it in raw format:
Figure 3. Conversion of the vmdk over to raw vm-801-disk-0
Start your Image up in the Proxmox Web GUI and, Booms! That’s it
Figure 4. VM up and running…. Need another cup of coffee
