By firestormv1
I’m in the process of migrating my instances hosted in an on-prem KVM host to Digital Ocean. I’m very concerned as these machines have never been in a cloud environment and as such doesn’t have cloud-init. I know that cloud-init does a lot of first-time startup stuff, but being that I’m going to spin up a droplet based off of this custom image (the qcow2 from the on-prem hypervisor), are there other ramifications I need to account for?
Will I be able to set the NIC to “dhcp” and be able to bind a floating IP to it or is there additional steps involved?
Will I be able to make snapshot backups of the running instance?
Are there any possible issues with cloud-init interfering with the instance if I install it after I get the instance spun up?
These are Debian Wheezy images.
Thank you for your advice, here’s to a hopefully smooth migration.
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Hi there,
DigitalOcean doesn’t officially support nested virtualization. While it’s possible to run KVM inside a DigitalOcean Droplet in some cases, it’s not a use case that DigitalOcean directly supports or recommends.
Without nested virtualization, you won’t be able to directly run your KVM virtual machines on DigitalOcean. Instead, what you could do is to convert your VMs to a format that DigitalOcean supports and then import them as custom images. DigitalOcean supports images in raw, qcow2, vhdx, vdi, and vmdk disk formats. You can convert your VMs to one of these formats using a tool like qemu-img.
Once you have your images in a supported format, you can upload them to DigitalOcean and create new Droplets based on those images.
For more information on the custom images, you can take a look at this documentation page here:
https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/images/custom-images/
If you’re considering nested virtualization, one alternative that might be more suitable is containerization using Docker. Docker can provide similar benefits to virtual machines, but with less overhead:
Best,
Bobby
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