Convert XVA Virtual Machine to VMDK

• Preparing Your Machine
• 1. Installing XVA-img
• 1.1 Installing xva-img from source
• 2. Extracting the XVA to Raw Disk
• 2.1 Extract the XVA File to Raw Disk
• 3. Convert disk.raw to VMDK
• 3.1 Convert the disk.raw file to a VMDK

Preparing Your Machine

1. Installing XVA-img

1.1 Installing xva-img from source

Objective: Install xve-image from source on an ubuntu 20.04 LTS machine in order to convert from XVA to a VMDK to be imported in VMWorkstation

Step 1. Navigate to eriklax/xva-img: XVA (Citrix Xen format) virtual disk tool. Supports RAW disk image exports and imports. (github.com) and download the entire zip file of the repository. In this situation, I am using wget on the Linux machine to download in my current directory.

Step 2. From terminal, unzip everything to whatever directory you want. I chose '/opt'

change directory to where the zip file is located. 

cd /opt/xva-img

Unzip the Master zip file you just downloaded from git

unzip master.zip

Step 3. Change directory into the unzipped directory of 'xva-img-master'

Step 4. Install the dependencies for xva-img as noted on the github page, and install from source

• sudo apt update && sudo apt install cmake g++ libssl-dev libxxhash-dev

• Once installation has completed, you will build from source to install

• Note: It will be easier to run as root from this point

  • Change directory into the xva-img repositry folder

    • cd /opt/xva-img/xva-img-master

  • Build 

    • cmake .

    • make

    • make install

This is the final step installing xva-img on to your machine.

2. Extracting the XVA to Raw Disk

2.1 Extract the XVA File to Raw Disk

Objective: Extract the disk from the from the XVA to a raw disk to be converted to VMDK.

Step 1. Navigate to a location that you would like to work from. In my scenario, I am working from my user's home directory in a folder name 'XVA VMs'

Belows is a screenshot of my working directory

Step 2. Once inside the working directory, run the following commands as root

• mkdir my-virtual-machine

• tar -xf my-virtual-machine.xva -C my-virtual-machine

• chmod -R 755 my-virtual-machine
  
  

Step 3. Next we are going to export the Disk  by utilizing disk-export command

xva-img -p disk-export my-virtual-machine/Ref\:4/ disk.raw

The Ref: number may vary. The way to get the correct number is to run the ls command against the "my-virtual-machine directory where the ova.xml and disk files are located. Reference the below screenshot.

Extraction Process Complete

It will take a little bit of time to extract, but the -p command when exporting will show you the current progress. Once it completes, you will have a 'disk.raw' file unless you decide to name it 'somethingelse.raw'

This completes the extraction of the disk from the XVA file. You can now examine the disk raw or convert it to any other format such as qcow2 or vmdk.

3. Convert disk.raw to VMDK

3.1 Convert the disk.raw file to a VMDK

Objective: Use qemu-img to convert the raw disk extracted from the XVA file in our working directory to a vmdk file for the ability to import in VMWare.

Step 1. Navigate to a location that you would like to work from. In my scenario, I am working from my user's home directory in a folder name 'XVA VMs'

Belows is a screenshot of my working directory

Step 2. Before you run the command, you need to ensure that you install qemu-utils. Once you ensured that qemu-utils is installed, you need to run the following command below:

qemu-img convert -f raw -O vmdk disk.raw satire-wordpress.vmdk

You can name the vmdk whatever you like, this is just specific to my scenario

That is all there is to it. Just let this process run and you will have usable VMDK that can now utilize in VMWare products.