openstack team mailing list archive

[Jay Pipes <jaypipes@xxxxxxxxx>]

2011/1/13 Diego Parrilla Santamaría <diego.parrilla.santamaria@xxxxxxxxx>:
> An appliance is the combination of metadata describing the virtual machine
> plus the virtual disks. The standard format in the virtualization industry
> is OVF. Basically, differs from VMX+VMDK(s) because it has a XML format that
> describes the virtual machine (and little bit its environment like
> firewalling, policies, etc...).
> VMX is VMware specific, and OVF is vendor agnostic (or should be...). From
> my perspective VMX + VMDK(s) is not an appliance format, but this is the
> kind of topic for a long discussion ;-)
> If you are looking for a simple way to describe the virtual machine
> parameters for an appliance, check OVF specs to get some inspiration. I
> think OVF full spec is overkill because the simpler approach of Nova.

Thanks for the explanation, Diego! Much appreciated.

The question arises because we are wondering what information to store
in Glance's registry that describes an image. I had proposed the
following, with additions from John Purrier:

disk_format: choices: VHD, VDI, VMDK, RAW, & QCOW2
appliance_format: choices: OVF, OVA, & AMI.

Do you agree that we should put VMX in the list of appliance formats,
as Ewan Mellor suggested?

Cheers!
jay