We can easily migrate a .ova virtual appliance into Proxmox.

An OVA file is a virtual appliance used by virtualization applications such as VMware Workstation and Oracle VM Virtualbox. It is a package that contains files used to describe a virtual machine, which includes an . OVF descriptor file, optional manifest (. MF) and certificate files, and other related files. (Source)

Transfer the .ova file to a temporary directory on your Proxmox server. I’ll be using openvpn-as-latest-vmware.ova as an example, but there is a better way to install OpenVPN Access Server on Proxmox. Replace pve with the hostname or IP address of your Proxmox server.

scp openvpn-as-latest-vmware.ova root@pve:/tmp/

Connect to your Proxmox server. Replace pve with the hostname or IP address of your Proxmox server.

ssh root@pve

Extract the .ova file to get access to the disk image file.

pushd /tmp/
tar xvf openvpn-as-latest-vmware.ova

Notice that one of the extracted files is a disk image: OpenVPN_Access_Server_ESXi-disk1.vmdk.

Head over to the webgui and prepare a VM. Don’t worry about the virtual disk that will be created, we’ll remove it later.

Import the virtual disk. Replace 100 with the ID of the VM you created.

qm importdisk 100 /tmp/OpenVPN_Access_Server_ESXi-disk1.vmdk local-lvm -format qcow2

Back in the webgui, we’ll remove the disk that was created by default and attach the newly imported disk.

Start the VM and get to work.