VMWare workstation - ova import not working

VMWare workstation - ova import not working

When importing ova and/or ovf files, if Workstation does not give any error but does not import the file as well, try importing the file in VMWare Player. When you do that, you will see that if the import fails, player will show a dialogue with log file name similar to /tmp/vmaware-<amitag>/.

From there, I was able to find out that, it was running ovftool.bin. Try to run that in a terminal and immediately I could see that libnsl was missing so, I just installed the same with

virt-install with cloud-init

If you have not heard about cloud-init then you should definately search for it and learn about cloud-config as well. You can find the documentation for cloud-config here. It is used for configuring VMs when running in cloud environments. Specially useful to inject the ssh keys or set the root password but you can do anything in the cloud-config as there is a section where you can run bash commands. While this is useful for cloud instances, you can make use of this feature when running your vm with qemu or libvirtd. All you need to do is either attach a iso disc with user-data and meta-data files in it or even simpler, you can use virt-install command. The command that I use is as follows

Podman repositories on ubuntu like distros

Recently I installed podman on ubuntu based dervative. I like podman a lot but to my distress I found that after installation, I was not able to search or run any containers. Found out that the repositories were not configured. So, if you run into such issues, then here is what you need to do. You need to create a file /etc/containers/registries.conf. And the contents of the file for just one docker hub registries would be -

Fix display size on libvirt/Qemu guest

Lot of times I find myself of VM that does not correctly resize the screen display and that is literally nuisance. So, here is quick and dirty fix for this.

First you need to find out information about your display with following command:

xrandr -q

And you will see output like this:

Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1920 x 1080, maximum 8192 x 8192
Virtual-0 connected primary 1920×1080+0+0 0mm x 0mm
1024×768      59.92 +
1920×1200     59.88
1920×1080     59.96*
1600×1200     59.87
1680×1050     59.95
1400×1050     59.98
1280×1024     59.89
1440×900      59.89
1280×960      59.94
1280×854      59.89
1280×800      59.81
1280×720      59.86
1152×768      59.78
800×600       59.86
848×480       59.66
720×480       59.71
640×480       59.38
Virtual-1 disconnected
Virtual-2 disconnected
Virtual-3 disconnected

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Install virtual machines in one line

To install a VM from command line, you can use the following command. Change the required parameters as need but you need to change at-least CDROM iso image and disk-path.

virt-install \
    -n myVM \
    --description "Test VM" \
    --os-type=Linux \
        --os-variant=centos7 \
        --ram=2048 \
        --vcpus=2 \
        --disk path=./myVM.img,bus=virtio,size=10 \
        --graphics none \
        --cdrom  <Image installtion CDROM>.iso \
        --net user

Python script to manage virtual machines with python API for libvirt.

Most of times I use virt-manager to manage VMs but sometimes, I have to manage VMs on other hosts over ssh when connected over VPN or while I am working remotely. GUI like virt-manager thus becomes slow, and hence I like to use cli commands and nothing is better than virsh. But here is simple script that I use sometimes to manage the VMs with CLI based menu. Hope you find it useful.

Most simple and fast lightweight container with Fedora systemd

If you need to have a quick bash shell in sandbox with not network as well, then the most simple command I could find so far is:

sudo virt-sandbox -c lxc:/// /bin/bash

For this you will need to have libvirt-sandbox installed which you can do with the following command:

sudo yum install libvirt-sandbox