openstack team mailing list archive

[Jay Pipes <jaypipes@xxxxxxxxx>]

2011/1/13 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.

So, that's a "no" to adding VMX as an appliance format?

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

Cool, thanks :)

-jay

> 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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>