XenServer 6.0 – Import/Export OVF

We had received several OVF from a vendor who exported their VM’s from VMWare and we needed to import them into our XenServer 6.0 environment. After learning that this functionality is now built into Citrix XenServer and no longer needing XenConverter we were excited. However our initial test to import failed. After re-reading the documentation and searching several forums, nothing appeared to resolve the problem – the import would start and several seconds later it would fail.

So we imported the images into our VMWare environment to ensure the OVF’s were good, and even exported them again just to make sure the OVF files themselves were not the issue.

We then tried to export a XenServer VM via OVF and it failed as well. However we could import and export VXA files without issues. Okay, so we have it narrowed down. A bit more research brought us to this Citrix Blog about TransferVM

http://blogs.citrix.com/2010/12/09/diagnosing-xenserver-appliance-wizard-failures/

We attempted this but it said that the package as already installed.

We then contact Citrix who said to try: Nagivating to /opt/xensource/packages/files/transfer-vm and then running the uninstall-transfer-vm.sh

However that didn’t work, it prompted for a UUID but it didn’t document anything about the UUID

We brought this back to our test environment and it worked fine, we uninstalled and then installed and our OVF imports work properly. The difference between the test environment and production is that production is in a pool, whereas the test is standalone.

I have tried to find documentation on which UUID it is looking for but at this point I’ve tried it with the pool, host, and sr UUIDs to no avail. I might have to resort to cycling hosts out of the pool into standalone mode and reinstalling the transfer-vm component and then rejoining the pool.