Information / Instructions for importing an OVA / OVF appliance from VirtualBox...

[edwardsnj]

I'm looking for information or instructions for importing an OVA / OVF file created using VirtualBox into UTM for my M1 Mac users. This is an archive with a disk image (VDI/VMDK) and various configuration settings inside.

I'm kinda surprised not to see any mention of this in the repository at all.

I would imagine that even if it needed to be done "manually", one could extract the disk image, convert to qcow, and configure a new virtual instance to use it. I have used qemu in the past, though it would be difficult to walk my users through the process.

Any suggestions?

[edwardsnj]

Just found this discussion, not sure why it didn't turn up in my searches yesterday: #2521

[conath]

@edwardsnj is the info in Discussion #2521 sufficient?

[edwardsnj]

I tried this today (had to negotiate with a student to try it on their laptop). I untar'ed the *.ova file to get the disk image and converted it to *.qcow2 format. It was a lot bigger! :-( Nevertheless, we installed UTM from https://mac.getutm.app/, created a new PC using the defaults, imported the *.qcow2 as a disk image, and tried to start the virtual machine.

We ended up in a UEFI startup shell. It looked like the three partitions from the disk were shown as blk0 blk1 and blk2, but I didn't what to do after that. Any suggestions? Do we have to setup something to mark the boot partition?

[conath]

I tried this today (had to negotiate with a student to try it on their laptop). I untar'ed the *.ova file to get the disk image and converted it to *.qcow2 format. It was a lot bigger! :-( Nevertheless, we installed UTM from https://mac.getutm.app/, created a new PC using the defaults, imported the *.qcow2 as a disk image, and tried to start the virtual machine.

We ended up in a UEFI startup shell. It looked like the three partitions from the disk were shown as blk0 blk1 and blk2, but I didn't what to do after that. Any suggestions? Do we have to setup something to mark the boot partition?

Is the previous VirtualBox machine installed using EFI boot or BIOS? If BIOS you will need to disable EFI in the UTM VM config “system” tab. It doesn’t hurt to try. If EFI, maybe the VM doesn’t know which partition to boot. You can type “exit” at the Shell prompt to get into the EFI GUI. Then go to Boot Maintenance Manager and boot from file. This way you can find the .efi file and it’s partition.

[edwardsnj]

OK, I will try this today.

[edwardsnj]

OK, so after toggling the UEFI option in settings, we got it to boot. However, the virtual machine didn't recognize the display (went into text-mode bootup) and then hung. Not sure where it got to. We tried a bunch of different display options, didn't seem to help. Is there something I can install on the CentOS 7 instance before making the *.qcow2 version of the disk that will help it startup successfully? The SPICE packages perhaps?

[raykuo18]

Hi @edwardsnj ,
I successfully import an ubuntu .ova file from VirtualBox on my MacBook(m1 pro), and here are the steps:

1. Extract the disk image from the .ova file using the following command:
   tar -xvf <image>.ova

2. Using qemu-img to convert the vmdk image to qcow2 format:
   qemu-img convert -O qcow2 <input>.vmdk <output>.qcow2

3. Open UTM, create a new vm and select Emulate

4. Select the Operating System (for me, it's Linux)

5. Select Boot from kernel image, and use the qcow2 file from step2

6. Hardware setting

7. Save the vm and open VM settings

8. Select Force Multicore (probably not necessary)

9. Create a removable USB drive, drag it to the first position, and select Linux Kernel

10. Change the qcow2 image type to Disk Image, and interface to VirtIO

10. Delete the IDE drive

11. Done!

Hope you find this information helpful.

[adespoton]

UTM should also be able to use vmdk or vdi files without pre-converting; I've moved a number of VirtualBox and VMWare Fusion VMs over just by importing the disk image into a new UTM config.

[osy]

Latest beta lets you check a box to not convert.

[nerdyinu]

@Ray02250418 Hello, Thank you for your information. I followed your instructions, but it ends up with this screen

Ho can I solve this?