Converting vmware images to proxmox images

Besides proxmox I am using vmware workstation on my laptop and I would like to be able to run some of the images from vmware on proxmox.
This should be possible according to:
https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Migration_of_servers_to_Proxmox_VE

I tested this and had succes converting Vulnerable Pentesting Lab Environment: 1 from vulnhub to proxmox.

It was "pretty straight forward" .... considering I am still a proxmox noob, what I did was:

1. Copy the vmware files from vulnhub, unzip them and open in vmware workstation
2. Export the virtual machine from vmware using the file->Export to OVF ... option.
   TIP - if you replace the .ovf extension with .ova during export you get a single file, this is what I usually do
3. Copy the .ova file to the /tmp directory on the proxmox server with scp using
   scp VPLE.ova user@<proxmox ip>:/tmp
4. Open the proxmox shell by selecting the node and pressing the shell button
5. Extract VPLE.ova to .ovf format using
   tar -xvf VPLE.ova
   resulting in the following files in /tmp :

   root@proxmox:/tmp# ls -la
   -rw-r--r--  1   64   64 4030016512 May 13 10:10 VPLE-disk1.vmdk
   -rw-r--r--  1   64   64        173 May 13 10:07 VPLE.mf
   -rw-r--r--  1   64   64      14942 May 13 10:07 VPLE.ovf
   

6. From the /tmp directory import the virtual machine to proxmox using
   qm importovf 200 /tmp/exported-vm.ovf local-lvm
   which is kind of tricky/not intuitive.
   200 is the VM id that will used in proxmox, this has to be and id not already in use.
   local-lvm is the storageID of your proxmox VM storage. This confused me to think that I need to specify the folder for my storage in ie.
   /var/lib/vz/template/iso/ which is wrong and gave me an error:

   root@proxmox:/tmp# qm importovf 200 VPLE.ovf /var/lib/vz/template/iso/
   400 Parameter verification failed.
   storage: invalid format - storage ID '/var/lib/vz/template/iso/' contains illegal characters
   

   This article helped me to use the command pvesm status to show available storage:

   root@proxmox:~# pvesm status
   Name            Type     Status           Total            Used       Available        %
   local            dir     active       236258376        20409668       205480676    8.64%
   vms          zfspool     active      1885863936        69213684      1816650252    3.67%
   

   the name column is the storageID
   The correct choice for me would be to use vms, but I actually made a mistake and chose local.
   I'll include the mistake in here to show how I fixed it later.

   Finally, running the correct command imported the .ovf file!

   root@proxmox:/tmp# qm importovf 200 VPLE.ovf local
   Formatting '/var/lib/vz/images/200/vm-200-disk-0.raw', fmt=raw size=21474836480 preallocation=off  
   transferred 0.0 B of 20.0 GiB (0.00%)  
   transferred 204.8 MiB of 20.0 GiB (1.00%)  
   transferred 409.6 MiB of 20.0 GiB (2.00%)  
   transferred 614.4 MiB of 20.0 GiB (3.00%)  
   transferred 819.2 MiB of 20.0 GiB (4.00%)  
   transferred 1.0 GiB of 20.0 GiB (5.00%)  
   transferred 1.2 GiB of 20.0 GiB (6.00%)  
   transferred 1.4 GiB of 20.0 GiB (7.00%)  
   transferred 1.6 GiB of 20.0 GiB (8.00%)  
   transferred 1.8 GiB of 20.0 GiB (9.00%)  
   transferred 2.0 GiB of 20.0 GiB (10.00%)  
   transferred 2.2 GiB of 20.0 GiB (11.00%) 
   ...... truncated
   transferred 20.0 GiB of 20.0 GiB (100.00%)
   

7. Back in proxmox my VM showed as 200 (VPLE) and was turned off. Perfect!
   I assigned a network interface from the hardware section of the VM using add and selecting the bridge I am using and virtIO as model.
   Then I tried to start the VM but got I an error
   TASK ERROR: storage 'local' does not support content-type 'images'
   Ahhh, this is the mistake I mentioned. The solution is to select the harddisk in the VM hardware section and use Disk Action to move the disk to a storage that supports images, in my case, you guessed it vms (which is a zfs pool with 2 disks in raid mirror mode)

   This worked and I was able to start the MV.

8. Bonus specific to the Vulnerable Pentesting Lab Environment: 1 VM
   After staring the environment and logging in through the console I checked the ip with
   hostname -I as instructed and I only got
   172.17.0.1 and no address from my DHCP ?? weird.... Troubleshooting the issue showed me that my physical NIC (ENS18) was down.
   I used sudo ifconfig ens18 up which brought the interface up, but still no ip address from DHCP.
   Fix was to renew the dhcp lease with
   sudo dhclient -r
   and then
   sudo dhclient to request a new lease.

   This worked and output was:

   administrator@VPLE:~ hostname -I
   192.168.1.102 172.17.0.1
   

Navigating to 192.168.1.102 from a machine on the network gave me the VPLE welcome screen.
I haven't tested all the VPLE applications, only a few that seems to work.

Remember to clean up your /tmp dir as the image files can consume a lot of space.

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Last update: 2023-09-22 13:41:09