Exporting and importing VMs

Move VM archives between hosts with anka export and anka import

Use anka export and anka import to archive a VM and move it to another host or user without a registry.

Export

  • Only available for Enterprise or Enterprise Plus licenses.
  • Exporting a VM is performing a unique copy like anka clone -c would do if it has no tags.
  • If you export a tagged VM in a chain (a VM that was cloned from another, or a tag on top of another VM tag), it will only export the VM layers that relate to that tag. You have to export and import all tags in the order they were created. This adds a fair bit of complexity though as each VM Tag is its own separate layer. When exporting, you’ll need to ensure the target is active on the host. To make it active, you can anka pull --tag 1 templateA (--local may speed this up if it was already pulled). Once active, exporting it requires --tag <val>.
This feature does not work if chunk_size is in use for the VM templates/tags.
> anka export --help
usage: export [options] vmid file

   Export a VM as an archive

arguments:
  vmid                     VM to export
  file                     Path to archive file

options:
  -t,--tag <val>           Export local VM tag
  -c,--copy                Include base tags into the archive

Import

> anka import --help
usage: import [options] [file]

   Import VM from an archive

arguments:
  file                     Archive with an exported VM

options:
  --fetch-only             Import tag without checkout
You can import a VM from a URL using curl -s VM.tar | anka import or ssh [email protected] dd if="VM.tar" | anka import