Looking to move on from VMware and the old 1U server that’s currently running vSphere 7.0 I started testing Proxmox. Seemed like the best option and has a wide support of hardware. I picked up a Beelink Me Mini like all the cool kids on YouTube and installed ProxMox. Pretty cool experience. Figured out what a LXC was and went from there.
Doing a test import, going from ESX to Proxmox, went easy enough with an Ubuntu Linux VM I spun up just for testing. My DNS is hosted on an Ubuntu VM and that was the first one I wanted to move over to a low powered mini computer. The test was perfect. No issues at all. Imported into Proxmox, modified the nic name in the Netplan YAML file. IP was reachable. I was up and running!
Time to move the DNS Ubuntu VM using the same method right?
NOPE! Couldn’t figure it out to save my life. My gut is telling me that it’s because the VM was thin provisioned. When I exported the VM to an OVF with the hope of using ovftool to create an OVA that I could import into Proxmox. But ovftool threw an error message too, the reported size of the vmdk was 0 byes.
Warning:
- No supported manifest(sha1, sha256, sha512) entry found for: 'ubuntu-01.ovf'.
- File is missing from the manifest: 'ubuntu-01.ovf'.
- No supported manifest(sha1, sha256, sha512) entry found for: 'ubuntu-01.nvram'.
- Wrong file size specified in OVF descriptor for 'ubuntu-01-0.vmdk' (specified: 0, actual 6017346048).
- Wrong file size specified in OVF descriptor for 'ubuntu-01.nvram' (specified: 0, actual 8684).
Completed with errors
What the hell… Looking back on Proxmox, it did give me an error stating: qemu-img: output file is smaller than input file. Digging into the issue further on Proxmox, I can see that qemu-img was showing the disk was zero bytes in size.
root@proxmox-02:~# qemu-img info /run/pve/import/esxi/esx1/mnt/ha-datacenter/LSSD/ubuntu-01/ubuntu-01.vmdk
image: /run/pve/import/esxi/esx1/mnt/ha-datacenter/LSSD/ubuntu-01/ubuntu-01.vmdk
file format: raw
virtual size: 1 KiB (1024 bytes)
disk size: 0 B
Child node '/file':
filename: /run/pve/import/esxi/esx1/mnt/ha-datacenter/LSSD/ubuntu-01/ubuntu-01.vmdk
protocol type: file
file length: 1 KiB (1024 bytes)
disk size: 0 B
root@proxmox-02:~# OK. WEIRD. Good thing all my VM’s are thin provisioned in VMware. Because I’m not made of storage…
What a lovely lesson. Never did find out what the root cause of my disk being reported as zero bytes was, but I ended up modifying the ovf file and correcting the disk size from zero to 6017346048. This allowed me to run ovftool successfully and then import the VM into Proxmox.
The next problem I get to tackle? Trying to get the SATA controller on my motherboard pass directly onto a Truenas Virtual Machine hosted in Proxmox!