8.10. Importing and Exporting Virtual Machines
8.10.1. Exporting and Importing Virtual Machines
A virtual machine or a template can be moved between data centers in the same environment, or to a different Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization environment. The Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager allows you to import and export virtual machines (and templates) stored in Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF). This feature can be used in multiple ways:
- Moving virtual resources between Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization environments.
- Move virtual machines and templates between data centers in a single Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization environment.
- Backing up virtual machines and templates.
There are three stages of exporting and importing virtual resources:
- First you export your virtual machines and templates to an export domain.
- Second, you detach the export domain from one data center, and attach it to another. You can attach it to a different data center in the same Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization environment, or attach it to a data center in a separate Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization environment that is managed by another installation of the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager.
- Third, you import your virtual machines and template into the data center you attached the export domain to.
A virtual machine must be stopped before it can be moved across data centers. If the virtual machine was created using a template, the template must exist in the destination data center for the virtual machine to work, or the virtual machine must be exported with the Collapse Snapshots option selected.