Importing .ova VMs into Proxmox

This is a short post to document how to run Virtualbox prepared VM inside Proxmox VE.

I have recently started to play with Vulnhub machines, and many images there are in Virtualbox format.

Few steps are necessary to complete the process.

• Download the VM image.
• Create new VM in Proxmox.
• Import the disk.
• Add the disk to the VM.
• Set the disk as first boot device.

An example can be the following:

wget https://download.vulnhub.com/nullbyte/NullByte.ova.zip
unzip NullByte.ova.zip
tar xvf NullByte.ova
qm importdisk 201 "NullByte-disk1.vmdk" local-lvm 

Here we can see that just tar command is necessary to extract the disk image from the .ova, and later we use qm to add the disk to a specific VM (ID=201 in this case).

Once this is done, the disk will appear as ‘unused Disk0’ in Proxmox web console. Edit this, press ‘Add’ and then from the options set it as first boot device.