One of the changes we made with virt-manager 1.0 was a large reworking of the virt-convert command line interface.

virt-convert started life as a tool for converting back and forth between different VM configuration formats. Originally it was just between vmx and virt-image(5), but it eventually grew ovf input support. However, for the common usage of trying to convert a vmx/ovf appliance into a libvirt guest, this involved an inconvenient two step process:

  • Convert to virt-image(5) with virt-convert
  • Convert to a running libvirt guest with virt-image(1)

Well, since virt-image didn't really have any users, it's planned for removal. So we took the opportunity to improve virt-convert in the process. Running virt-convert is now as simple as:

virt-convert fedora18.ova

or

virt-convert centos6.tar.gz

And a we convert directly to libvirt XML and launch the guest. Standard libvirt options are allowed, like --connect for specifying the libvirt driver.

The tool hasn't been heavily used and there's definitely still a lot of details we are missing, so if you hit any issues please file a bug report.

(Long term it sounds like gnome-boxes may grow a similar feature as mentioned over here, so maybe virt-convert isn't long for this world since there will likely be a command line interface for it as well)