Import unmanaged instances from Proxmox

[ShadowJonathan]

The required feature described as a wish

As a system administrator, I've previously had many instances on Proxmox, but now that I can apply cloudstack as a layer on top of proxmox, I want to be able to manage those instances via CloudStack, to help complete a migration of proxmox to cloudstack.

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[nvazquez]

Hi @ShadowJonathan thanks for the suggestion, I think its a great feature idea. Have you performed any manual operations / attempts to migrate these VMs to CloudStack? If that is the case can you please describe it and share your results?

[shwstppr]

This would eventually be a good functionality for users wanting to migrate to CloudStack from Proxmox as the control plane. From the implementation pov, the current Proxmox extension or Orchestrator-type extensions can support listing and import operations, but it may need some discussion and thinking on networking and things like templates and volumes. Before import support, it would be great if we could have support for volumes with the current Orchestration extensions.

[ShadowJonathan]

@nvazquez im not aware of any manual operations? I thought this was the manual operation?

If you mean "dump the disk and import it in cloudstack", then no, and for business reasons we can't do that with some of these VMs, for guarantees of uptime, and there are risks of extra downtime involved due to possible misconfigurations that happen during that (manual) migration process

And quite frankly, we don't want to go through that ordeal again with the hundreds of VMs we have currently running, considering we did that as part of a migration from another platform to Proxmox only recently

[ShadowJonathan]

@shwstppr indeed, one of the biggest worries on our end is that in whatever state the proxmox VM exists/existed, and with whatever manual additions or changes it has from a "norm" that cloudstack establishes, that it is hard to import them in their current state, or that it is hard to capture all the "quirks", or formalise all disks/networks position, state, offering, and more.

i'm not sure how or if this can be solved, but it's one thing to look out for

from my perspective in that regard, either;

1. instances need to be "pre-steamed" (manually) before they become eligible for import

2. instances get "steamed" during an import, with exact steps and changes (/ diff) of how the VM will be altered, so that system administrators can clear that

[DaanHoogland]

@ShadowJonathan , I think what @nvazquez means by manual operations is to get an idea what to encode. You can look at https://docs.cloudstack.apache.org/en/latest/adminguide/extensions.html#custom-actions for what this means.