RHEV - Importing OVA Templates

Overview

Virtual machine disk images are specific to hypervisors and each hypervisor has its own format. Open Virtual Format (OVF) is a packaging standard designed to address portability and deployment of virtual machines across different hypervisors. The OVF structure consists of a number files: descriptor, manifest, certificate and disk images or resource files such as ISOs. In order to make things even more streamlined and simpler for deploying virtual appliances an Open Virtual Applicance (OVA) standard was created. OVA is a single file distribution of an OVF package, stored in TAR format. In this post we will explore how to import OVAs into RHEV.

Create Export Storage Domain

An Export Storage Domain is an NFS share made available to RHEV environment for purpose of importing templates such as the OVA.

• Create an NFS share on an NFS server and export to all RHEV-H and RHEV-M hosts. A guide for how to do this on RHEL systems can be found here.
• Log on to the RHEV administrator portal and under system select the "storage" tab and "New Domain".

• After adding Export Storage Domain it should become available momentarily.

Uploading OVA to Export Storage Domain

The OVA can be uploaded using the engine-image-uploader tool. If the tool is not present you can install it using the below command:

• yum install rhevm-image-uploader

In order to upload OVA run the following command:

• engine-image-uploader -e EXPORT_DOMAIN -N ATOMIC upload rhel-atomic-cloud-7.1-0.x86_64.rhevm.ova

 Importing OVA as template

In order to create virtual machines from OVA we must first import that OVA as a template.

• Log on to RHEV administrator portal and under system select the "storage" tab.
• Next select the EXPORT_DOMAIN and the "Template Import" tab.
• Select the template (in this case CFME) and import.

Creating Virtual Machine from Template

Now that we have the OVA template imported we can create a new virtual machine and simply select the template "CFME".

(c) 2015 Keith Tenzer