Converting OVA file for use with Oracle VM Server Xen Commands

Recently, my team received a OVA file (VBX_Image_from_customer.ova) - a customer instance image to validate SOA Suite environment upgrade in-house. It would have been much easier to import the appliance into the Virtual Box on our local env (laptop/desktop) and get going. However, we had to host the appliance internally for cross-development and QA teams, and the only dedicated hardware at our disposal was a Oracle VM Server 3.2 physical machine.

Basically, the problem was two-fold:
a) OVA file cannot be specified as a disk parameter in the Oracle VM template configuration vm.cfg
b) Virtual Box cannot be installed on a Oracle VM Server machine (because Virtual Box can't operate under another hypervisor)

In this write-up, I will share the main tasks executed to use the ova file and create the guest virtual machine on the OVM Server host.   The OVA (Open Virtual Appliance) file is nothing more than a TAR archive, containing the .OVF and .VMDK files. For those interested, here is a good post by Mike on the different file formats and tools for virtualization.

-- Install disk image conversion utility
# yum install kvm-qemu-img.x86_64

-- Extract the OVA file contents
# tar -xvf VBX_Image_from_customer.ova
# ls
    - VBX_Image_from_customer-disk1.vmdk
    - VBX_Image_from_customer.ovf

-- Determine if your version of QEMU supports VMDK Sparse by executing the following command
# qemu-img info VBX_Image_from_customer-disk1.vmdk

-- if you get a message like below then VMDK Sparse is not supported
<<qemu-img: Could not open 'VBX_Image_from_customer-disk1.vmdk'>>

-- Use the VBoxManage command-line tool that ships with VirtualBox (if qemu-img option does not work)
# VBoxManage clonehd VBX_Image_from_customer-disk1.vmdk --format RAW developmentSOA.img

-- Convert from vmdk to raw img if your version of QEMU supports VMDK Sparse
# qemu-img convert -f vmdk -O raw VBX_Image_from_customer-disk1.vmdk developmentSOA.img

-- Use the RAW image file in the vm.cfg 'disk' parameter; sample file below

bootloader = '/usr/bin/pygrub'
device_model = '/usr/lib/xen/bin/qemu-dm'
disk = ['file:<path-to-OVS-repository>/developmentSOA.img,hda,w']
memory = '8192'
maxmem = '8192'
OVM_simple_name = 'MyCompany SOA V2'
name = 'SOA_V2_MYCOMP'
OVM_os_type = 'Oracle Linux 5'
vcpus = 4
uuid = 'e405f7ea-80bb-4a14-97b2-cf969077e25a'
on_crash = 'restart'
on_reboot = 'restart'
keymap = 'en-us'
vnc = 1
vncconsole = 1
vnclisten = '127.0.0.1'
vncpasswd = ''
vncunused = 1
vif = ['bridge=xenbr0']
timer_mode = 2
expose_host_uuid = 1

-- Create VM guest instance using Xen command
# xm create vm.cfg -c

You should be all set to start up the customer guest virtual machine.