Notes on Proxmox VE

Importing an OVA / OVF disk image in to Proxmox VE

This is a summary of what can be found on various blogs and the Proxmox wiki, but with a minor adjustment. I found that some of the online information was no longer correct, as of Juli 2024.

We do not need a VM

First off, we do not make a new VM manually. Other sources of information online say that we need to make a new VM and use the VM ID later. However, it doesn't work like that anymore. We will need an unused VM ID, and the location where we want to store the VM disk image. If our highest existing VM id is 100, we will use 101 for the VM that we will create to go along with our disk image.

We send our OVA or OVF file to our Proxmox VE server

$ scp bitnami-wordpressmultisite-6.5.5-r6-debian-12-amd64.ovaroot@pve1:/tmp bitnami-wordpressmultisite-6.5.5-r6-debian-12-amd64.ova                                                                   100%  957MB 109.0MB/s   00:08
$ ssh root@pve1
root@pve1:~# cd /tmp/

If our file is an OVA file we need to unpack it first

Apparently an OVA file is a tarball, we use tar with the arguments e for extract, f for file (instead of a magnetic tape) and v for verbose (it will tell us which files came out of the OVA file).

root@pve1:/tmp# tar xfv bitnami-wordpressmultisite-6.5.5-r6-debian-12-amd64.ova
common-wordpressmultisite-6-6.5.5-r6-debian-12-amd64.ovf
common-wordpressmultisite-6-6.5.5-r6-debian-12-amd64.mf
common-wordpressmultisite-6-6.5.5-r6-debian-12-amd64-disk-0.vmdk

Now that we have an OVF file we can continue with the next step.

Attach the OVF file to the VM

We need the VM ID for the VM that we created for this, and the storage location where we store VM disk images.

The command will look like this:

root@pve1:/tmp# qm importovf {non-existing VM ID for the new VM that are about to create} {OVF file name} {your VM disk image storage location}

For example:

root@pve1:/tmp# qm importovf 102 common-wordpressmultisite-6-6.5.5-r6-debian-12-amd64.ovf storage

Now we can see that we have a new VM with the expected VM ID. We can turn this VM in to a template that we can clone to create new VMs, to avoid having to do the above steps again later for this same OVA or OVF file. Read more about VM templates and clones here.

ZFS on Proxmox doesn't work with different size disks

Make sure your disks are the same size. I could not get it to work with differently sized disks. It appears replaying and correcting the failed GUI command on the commandline works but misses some steps.