openstack team mailing list archive

[Erik Carlin <erik.carlin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I would just call it VMDK.  That's what Vmware
(http://www.vmware.com/technical-resources/interfaces/vmdk.html) and
everyone else calls it, even though there may be extra files to support
it.  We're just naming the disk format here.

We had also talked about the IMG disk format to support AMIs but RAW is
the same thing so we are covered there.

Erik

  

On 1/13/11 9:15 AM, "Jay Pipes" <jaypipes@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>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
>
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