Hello, and welcome to this presentation on exporting a virtual machine, or VM, and a
template as Open Virtual Appliance, or OVA, in the Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager.
So what is an Open Virtual Appliance?
An Open Virtual Appliance is a package that contains the combined elements of a virtual
machine.
Oracle Linux Virtual Manager packages an OVA to a TAR archive file.
The TAR file contains the configuration of the VM in the OVF, or Open Virtualization
Format directories.
These directories include the virtual disk and VM related meta date.
Now, let's talk about the export directory.
The export directory stores OVA files in a directory on a KVM host.
You need to create this directory, and set the privileges on the directory to read and
write for both the owner, which is vdsm, and the group, kvm.
For example, the image on the slide shows an export directory called templates.
You can also see that read and write permissions for the vdsm owner and the kvm group are set.
The next couple of slides show the steps for exporting a virtual machine as an OVA Appliance
in Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager UI.
The example starts on the Virtual Machines page of the Compute menu.
The first step is selecting the VM you want to export.
The image on the slide shows ol8-vm1 highlighted in the table of virtual machines.
Next, you click the three-dot icon to expand the kebab menu.
From the kebab menu, you choose the Export as OVA option.
This displays the Export Virtual Machine(s) As Virtual Appliance dialog.
And in the dialog, you select the host containing the export directory, ovs037 in this example.
For the directory, the image on the slide shows /templates as the full path to the export
directory on the KVM host.
And the last step is providing a name for the OVA file.
The example on the slide shows the name, ol80-vm1.ova.
Then you click OK to begin the export.
When the operation completes, you'll find an ova file with the name given in the export
directory on the KVM host.
You can later import the ova file and create virtual machines from it.
Now, let's demonstrate creating an OVA from a template of a virtual machine.
The process is not much different than exporting a VM as an OVA.
We begin the demonstration on the dashboard of the Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager
UI.
From the navigation menu we go to the Compute, Templates page.
From the table I select ol77vm-template, which is our only template.
I select Export as OVA from the Export dropdown menu.
The Export Template(s) as Virtual Appliance dialog window displays.
In the host field I select ovs037 from the host dropdown menu.
ovs037 is the KVM host of my export directory.
I then enter the full path of the directory on ovs037, again its /templates in this scenario.
I keep the default name of ol77vm-template.ova for the name of the OVA file and then click
OK to begin the export.
The export will take a few minutes, while it is happening lets continue discussing the
export process.
Export times vary depending on the size of your template.
The template we're exporting is based on a virtual machine with a 100 gibibyte virtual
disk image running a minimal installation of Oracle Linux 7.7.
We can monitor the process by clicking the Tasks icon at the top of the page.
The top blue status bar shows that the exporting task is running.
You can also click the Events tab from the left navigation menu.
The Event process logs events only when there's an error.
So far, so good.
Now, let's look at the export directory on ovs037, while the export process is running.
I open a terminal window which I have already logged in to ovs037.
And change directories to /templates.
Here, I'll run the ls -l command to list the contents of the directory.
Inside the directory there is an ol77vm-template.ova.tmp file being created.
I minimize the terminal window for now and return to the Templates page and wait for
the process to complete.
The export process will still take a few minutes more, let's jump ahead to just before it completes.
When the export process completes, a green pop-up window appears notifying you that the
export has finished and path to the ova file.
To verify that our ova file is a TAR file, we'll reopen a terminal window and run the
file command on it.
The command identifies the file to be a POSIX TAR archive.
Oracle provides a vast number of resources that you can use to discover more about this
subject and others in the Oracle Learning Library.
You can access Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager documentation at the link shown.
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