openstack team mailing list archive

[Jay Pipes <jaypipes@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 07/26/2013 05:10 AM, Deepak Jeswani1 wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I have an instance running various applications in my environment and I
> want to  transfer it to Openstack. One way is to take image of my instance,
> register it with Openstack image library and then create an instance out of
> it. I am wondering whether there can be a direct way to register it with
> Openstack.
>
> Please suggest me a good way to transfer my instance to Openstack.

If you have a Swift installation, it's quite easy.

1) Snapshot your instance in your VMWare or Virtualbox environment
2) Convert the snapshot to a format that the hypervisor used in your 
OpenStack environment supports (ISO or QCOW2 is easiest for KVM)
3) Upload your converted image into Swift
4) Issue a call to Glance to register your image from Swift:

glance image-create --disk-format=<FORMAT> --container-format=<FORMAT> 
--location=<SWIFT_URI>

The image will then appear in your tenant's list of images in Horizon or 
glance image-list, and you may use it to launch an instance.

All the best,
-jay

p.s. You don't necessarily need to use Swift, either... you could always 
just place your converted image on a web server somewhere and replace 
<SWIFT_URI> with the URI of your image.