Migration from Nutanix AHV to CloudStack KVM

[notdrowningworking]

Has anyone done any bulk migrations of Nutanix AHV virtual machines to CloudStack? If anyone has, what methods or tools/APIs did you use and would recommend.

We are attempting to write scripts to export VMs from AHV using Prism Central APIs to create a QCOW2 OVA and import the QCOW into ACS with known VM settings exported in the OVF file from AHV. The export from AHV is not very fast, and we were wondering if anyone has found another method or perhaps backup/replication tool that supports both AHV and KVM which might make the process faster or more streamlined.

Any ideas would be most welcome.

[DaanHoogland]

@notdrowningworking , I heard Hystax do these kind of migrations. I am not sure if this falls in their matix.

[notdrowningworking]

Thanks @DaanHoogland I will look into Hystax and send them a query

[notdrowningworking]

@DaanHoogland it turns out Hystax are actively developing full integration with CloudStack to be released by end of May. And they also have engineers who originally developed AHV.

[NuxRo]

Do you have access to the underlying storage? That might be the faster/straightforward way.

No experience with Nutanix, sorry.

[notdrowningworking]

Thanks @NuxRo , you would think that accessing would be faster but unfortunately it's a locked distributed HCI storage system and there is no direct way to browse or access the storage. There is a CLI method to locate the UUID's of the RAW disks attached to a VM but Nutanix don't support running qemu-img in later versions to convert the RAW disks to QCOW2 (especially not in the platform itself). Looks like unless anyone has found a Backup/Restore solution, we will have to pursue using the APIs to generate, export a VM as an OVA as being the only programmatic/automated way to pull VM disks out of Nutanix. Appreciate your thoughts.

[NuxRo]

Wow, quite a bit of lock-in, perhaps more than VMWare.
The Nutanix platform, is it a Linux distro, are you able to install qemu-img separately?

[notdrowningworking]

Yes indeed there is lock-in given the OS used is Rocky Linux under the hood. Nutanix actively advise against using qemu-img in one of their support articles citing using the OVA export method. I think this is because their controller-vm (doing all the storage IO) would be put under excessive load and take away resources from VM IO.

Hystax may come to the rescue though, as I reached out to them and are planning on releasing CloudStack as a supported target by the end of this month - in their words "huge global demand to migrate to Apache CloudStack". So exciting times...