Export VMs from XCP-ng to TrueNAS 25.04.0

Apps and Virtualization
1

I have a few VMs, mostly Debian 12, running on XCP-ng.
What would be the correct procedure for me to transfer these VMs to TrueNAS 25.04?

2

This is somewhat rhetorical, but why would you want to? Unless it is for some sort of testing. TNS is not a hypervisor platform.

3

Yes, it’s a test to see if I can eliminate my XCP-ng server.

At the moment, of the 9 VMs I have, 8 of them can easily be replaced with small Dockers apps.

But one of them needs to remain in a VM, as it would be very complicated to move it completely to something smaller. It’s a webserver with the Hestia Control Panel.

So my biggest problem would be just this VM.

4

It’s not something we’ve made super easy and UI driven yet, but yes you can do this. Process looks like this:

  • Export VM to RAW disk image format.
  • Copy RAW image to TrueNAS
  • dd RAW image to a newly created ZVOL
  • Import ZVOL into newly created VM

It’s on our todo list to make this all UI driven.

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5

You’ll want to test out not just “can I import it” and “will it run”, but other features of XCP-ng you may take for granted that you will lose in the current state of Incus; easy snapshoting and backup for example, ability to failover the VM to another machine, etc.

6

really.
One of the things I know I’ll miss is the easy and fully automatic way to make backups, especially differential backups.

But running a server, where at the moment I only need a single VM, and putting it on my TrueNAS would be a huge saving, and in my opinion I think it’s worth the inconvenience for backups.

7

TrueNAS does automatic differential backups of VM’s disk images aka zvols. Even CORE has been doing that for years.

You need a target with ZFS, of course, but why would you use anything but ZFS?

1 Like
8

Thanks for the reply Kris.
Will we ever be able to import an OVA directly to TrueNAS via the UI?

9

The plan is to support various disk formats, VMDK, VDI, QCOW2, RAW, etc.

OVA might be trickier, so I don’t know if we get to that in the next release this fall. OVA bundles a lot of the VM configuration knobs, and the challenge there is to try and map those settings to values our system supports. It’s not always a 1:1 neat match, especially when you start getting into devices (GPU|NIC|USB), pass-through, etc. The only stuff that really cleanly migrates is CPU count or Memory limits, and to do that effort for a couple of fields at best (which take about 5 seconds to input by the user) may not be worth the effort on our part.

But we’ll see. Not saying no, just will be a lower priority thing vs other improvements we do want to see land in this fall update.

1 Like
10

Even though it may take longer, it’s good to know that it’s on the radar, but the best thing is to know that the conversion of the disc formats is already in the plans, that alone is wonderful.

Thanks again.