Misc.

This page contains general information about Virtual Machines in Reven that can be useful at various stages when using the product.

VM storage location

For certain operations on this page, you need to know where the Project Manager stores the virtual machine's disks.

By default, this path is $DATA/reven/VMs where $DATA is the main storage folder for esReven, as configured in the .env file at the root of the esReven installation.

Supported disk formats

Note that the native disk image format Reven supports is qcow2.

That being said, the VM provisioning step in the Project Manager can convert the disk image from multiple formats for you. It uses the tool qemu-img to do so, and so supports all formats this tool does. They include:

  • qcow (version 1)
  • vdi
  • vmdk
  • vhdx

These formats are listed by the QUASAR_QEMU_SCAN_FORMATS variable in your settings, see the documentation of this variable in $DATA/reven/config/quasar.py for more information.

Note: the ova format is not in this list because it is not directly a disk image, see below for how to work with this format.

Adding a VM in OVA format

To use a VM in Open Virtual Appliance (OVA) format with Reven, please follow the steps below:

  1. Unzip the OVA archive.
  2. Use the VM preparation Wizard to upload the .vmdk or .vdi (depending on the OVA) file contained in the archive from your disk to the server.
  3. Let the VM Wizard guide you through the next steps.

Archiving and importing VMs back

While the Project Manager does not provide an explicit VM export functionality, you can manually archive VM disks & snapshots in the VM storage location.

To export a VM, you can:

  1. Open a shell to the server and change your current directory to the VM storage location.
  2. Compress a VM along with all its snapshots with a command such as tar -czf myVmArchive.tar.gz MyVmDiskName.qcow2*. Note the * at the end of the command to include disk snapshots.
  3. You can now move the archive myVmArchive.tar.gz to any location you want.

To import a VM archived with the above method, you must now provision the VM manually and register it:

  1. Open a shell to the server and change your current directory to the VM storage location.
  2. Extract the VM disk files with a command such as tar -xf myVmArchive.tar.gz
  3. Now open the Project Manager's VM import Wizard, and select the VM disk MyVmDiskName.qcow2
  4. Fill the VM Setup page and click Next
  5. At this point the Wizard will detect that the VM already comes with a set of disk snapshots. Click on "Importing".

Your VM is ready to use.

NOTE: when importing an archived VM, you should not use the Wizard's provisioning step: the latter would not upload the disk snapshots along the disk image, and you would then have to recreate them from scratch.

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