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Leaving Nutanix for Kairon

Transiva exports a VM out of Nutanix through the Prism v4 API. h2kvm converts it and can hand it to Kairon through Veyron (--deploy-kairon).

Status: the Kairon hand-off was not run in the Nutanix test. What was run end to end is Nutanix export, h2kvm conversion, and a boot on libvirt/KVM and on KubeVirt, against Chimera's Nutanix simulator. Treat the Kairon step below as the documented h2kvm hand-off, not as something verified with a Nutanix source.

The path​

Nutanix (Prism v4)  ->  hyperexport  ->  h2kvm  ->  Veyron  ->  Kairon Machine
  1. Export with Transiva: hyperexport --provider nutanix -vm <name> -resolve-containers -mounts <container>:<nfs-path>. This writes a qcow2 and artifact-manifest.json; the source VM is untouched.
  2. Convert and land with h2kvm using --deploy-kairon. h2kvm asks Veyron to create a Kairon Machine that points at the converted disk, pinned by sha256. See the h2kvm README for the flags.

What was measured elsewhere in the path​

Export, convert and boots on KVM and KubeVirt passed in an unattended run on an Ubuntu 24.04 cloud image: 7 of 7 stages, 747 s (case study).

Not covered​

  • A Kairon landing from a Nutanix export.
  • A real Nutanix cluster, Windows, UEFI, multi-disk or large VMs.
  • Boot repair on a guest that needs it (the Ubuntu test image needed only h2kvm's DHCP network fallback).

Related: runbook-vm-export.md, WHAT_SHIPS.md.