VIRT-V2V-RELEASE-NOTES-2.8(1)

📦
version 2.13.8 · 8 versions
, in centos-stream 10

🎀 virt-v2v-release-notes — bestie edition 🎀

okay so this is the virt-v2v-release-notes manual page, living under the Virtualization Support umbrella, and it's the glow-up diary for virt-v2v 2.8. no cap. 💅

✨ NAME ✨

virt-v2v-release-notes — the virt-v2v release notes for 2.8, bestie. that's the whole vibe.

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

These are the release notes for virt-v2v 2.8, and they spill all the major changes since 2.6. literally the receipts. 🧾

Virt-v2v 2.8.0 was released on 11th June 2025. mark your calendar, it's giving historic. 🗓️

🦋 New features 🦋

  • New virt-v2v-open(1) tool!! 🎉 This can be used to open the virt-v2v source and run a user program on it. For example, virt-inspector(1) or guestfish(1) can be used to examine the source to discover what operating systems or files are present before conversion. lowkey a superpower.
  • Windows Server 2025 is supported (thanks Ming Xie). 👑 new Windows just dropped.
  • Two features have been added to enhance data integrity, and honestly? obsessed. 💖
    • Firstly, you can specify a <checksum> field for each input disk (when importing from libvirt). Virt-v2v will verify the checksum of the actual disk matches the expected checksum. 🧐
    • Secondly, virt-v2v in debug mode now computes the blkhash (a type of checksum) of the converted disk and prints it out, allowing you to compare the blkhash with the final output. 🔥
  • The UEFI secureboot property is now modelled correctly, and (for outputs which support it) is reflected in the output metadata (thanks Daniel Berrange, Andrea Bolognani, Ming Xie). it ate. ✨
  • Parallel disk copies are now possible, using the --parallel=N option. The default behaviour is still to do serial copies, so no surprises. 🚦
  • virt-v2v-in-place(1) has a new -O option. This generates the same output as virt-v2v-inspector(1), allowing callers to combine both passes into one. two-for-one, we love efficiency. 🫶
  • Virtio-win driver selection has been made more robust. It now selects the correct drivers to install in more cases, and avoids installing unnecessary debugging and SRIOV files. Libosinfo is no longer used for this, as the osinfo metadata used had grown out of date. (Cole Robinson) slay. 💅
  • We now check filesystem integrity (using tools like fsck(8)) before and after conversion, to ensure both that we fully understand the filesystem before conversion and that no corruption has happened during conversion. At the moment this is only implemented for Btrfs, ext4 and XFS. safety first bestie. 🛡️

💀 Features removed 💀

Handling of kmod-xenpv has been removed. This only applied to RHEL 3 and RHEL 4 guests being converted from very ancient versions of Xen (Cole Robinson). rip, but like, respectfully. 🪦

Some options that have been deprecated since 2018 and earlier were removed. it's giving spring cleaning:

  • --compressed — use -oo compressed instead.
  • --no-trim — this did nothing. literally nothing. 😭
  • --password-file — use --ip instead.
  • --qemu-boot — use -oo qemu-boot instead.
  • --vddk-* — use --io vddk-* instead.
  • --vdsm-* — use --oo vdsm-* instead.
  • --vmtype — this did nothing. also nothing. 🙈

The options -o rhv-upload and -o rhv have been renamed to -o ovirt-upload and -o ovirt respectively, although aliases for the other names remain. so your muscle memory is safe, don't panic. 🏷️

🔧 Other fixes 🔧

  • Update support page to cover RHEL 10 and Windows Server 2025. 📄
  • When importing from libvirt sources, trim whitespace from around the <name> element, rather than creating a guest name containing that whitespace. no more accidental " my-vm " energy. ✂️
  • We no longer overwrite the EFI grub2 wrapper file (/boot/efi/EFI/<OS>/grub.cfg) on Fedora ≥ 34 and RHEL ≥ 9.0. hands off. 🙅
  • When removing packages during conversion, use yum, apt, and similar tools so that dependencies are also removed (Cole Robinson). tidy. 🧹
  • When some rpm commands run in the context of the guest produced more than 4MB of output, virt-v2v conversions would fail. This has now been fixed (thanks Nijin Ashok). 😮‍💨
  • Virt-v2v is now compatible with guests that use dnf5. 💖
  • -i vmx mode now supports importing guests with SATA-emulated disks. 🖥️
  • Converting from a VMware snapshot is now possible, when using VDDK, using the io vddk-file=... options (thanks Martin Necas). 🎉
  • Conversion failures when guest /etc/resolv.conf is immutable are common enough that we have now documented this problem in the manual (thanks Dan Clark). at least now you'll know why. 😭
  • Debug information now contains much more readable information about guest mountpoints, similar to the output of virt-df(1). readable debug logs?? iconic. 📊
  • -o libvirt mode no longer generates its own osinfo short IDs. Instead we use the osinfo short IDs from libguestfs inspection (Cole Robinson). 🏷️
  • Document how to activate Bitlocker for Windows 11 with vTPM (thanks Ming Xie). 🔐

🏗️ Build changes 🏗️

  • json-c is now required. This replaces Jansson which was previously used for parsing JSON input files. out with the old. 📦
  • libguestfs ≥ 1.56 is now required.
  • OCaml ≥ 4.08 is now required.
  • libnbd ≥ 1.14 is now required.
  • nbdkit ≥ 1.28 is now required, although it is better to use more recent versions where possible. (fr fr, go newer if you can 💅)
  • OCaml oUnit is no longer used.
  • We now assume that __attribute__((cleanup)) always works. This requires gcc or Clang. 🔨
  • The configure option --with-virt-v2v-nbdkit-python-plugin has been removed. It was only needed for very old versions of nbdkit and Python. bye boo. 👋
  • Tests should no longer break if ntfs-3g is not supported by libguestfs. 🙏
  • Fix compatibility with GNU gettext 0.25. 🌍

🧚 Internals 🧚

  • The tests were modified to use a set of common functions and remove use of the weird $TEST_FUNCTIONS macro, similar to how we do it in nbdkit. weird macro, begone. 🪄
  • The way we generate the phony virtio-win drivers (for testing) has been simplified. Also there are new regression tests to ensure that virt-v2v installs the correct set of driver files. (Cole Robinson). ✅
  • Phony Windows guests are now generated for several different versions of Windows, allowing more broad testing (Cole Robinson). 🪟
  • Some deprecated autoconf macros are no longer used. 🧼
  • nbdkit-cacheextents-filter(1) is no longer used, as it did not help performance now that we have switched to using nbdcopy(1) (thanks Martin Kletzander). 💨
  • With multi-disk guests, in some common cases we are now able to use a single nbdkit(1) instance to read or write all disks, instead of needing to run an nbdkit instance per disk, which can greatly reduce the number of external processes that virt-v2v will run. The performance and results should not be different. To take full advantage of this you have to use nbdkit ≥ 1.44. 👑 queen behavior.
  • Several typos and spelling mistakes in the documentation were fixed (thanks Eric Blake). 🐛✨
  • Duplicated code used to parse input (-i) and output (-o) options across the tools has been refactored in one place. DRY, we stan. 💜
  • Some internal OCaml List and String functions that we used have been replaced by ones from the OCaml stdlib, reducing code maintenance. 🧽

🐞 Bugs fixed 🐞

⭐ SEE ALSO ⭐

virt-v2v(1). that's it. that's the list. go read it bestie. 🫶

👑 AUTHORS 👑

Authors of virt-v2v 2.8, the literal dream team:

  • Cole Robinson
  • Krascovict Petrov
  • Richard W.M. Jones
  • Ricky Tigg
  • Yuri Chornoivan

Copyright (C) 2009-2025 Red Hat Inc.

📜 LICENSE 📜

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. (yes, that's the all-caps legal bit — it means business, don't skip it 😤)

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA.

🐛 BUGS 🐛

To get a list of bugs against libguestfs, use this link:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/buglist.cgi?component=libguestfs&product=Virtualization+Tools

To report a new bug against libguestfs, use this link:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/enter_bug.cgi?component=libguestfs&product=Virtualization+Tools

When reporting a bug, please supply — like, actually supply all of these, it makes everyone's life easier 🥺:

  • The version of libguestfs.
  • Where you got libguestfs (eg. which Linux distro, compiled from source, etc)
  • Describe the bug accurately and give a way to reproduce it.
  • Run libguestfs-test-tool(1) and paste the complete, unedited output into the bug report.
ok that's the whole page, you're caught up. now go convert something and slay. 🦋💅

and finally, the cute sign-off you asked for: this page came from virt-v2v-2.13.8, dated 2026-10-05, and it's titled virt-v2v-re...e-notes-2.8(1) because terminals truncate things and we forgive them. mwah 💜

📦 where this page comes from