openstack team mailing list archive

[Diego Parrilla Santamaría <diego.parrilla.santamaria@xxxxxxxxx>]

2011/1/13 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?
>
>
Well... VMX is probably too VMware oriented. My only concern about this kind
of proprietary parameter file is you don't really have the chance to control
its lifecycle. New versions, changes... and developers lagging behind of
this changes. It can be a nightmare.

But this is more a decision of Product Management than a technical
decision... from my perspective. From a pure user perspective, the more
options the better, of course.

BTW, I think we did a good job in Abicloud about virtual disk formats and
virtual images: http://abiquo.org/display/ABI16/Virtual+Images+Introduction

Cheers
Diego



-
Diego Parrilla
nubeblog.com | nubeblog@xxxxxxxxxxxx | twitter.com/nubeblog
+34 649 94 43 29






> Cheers!
> jay
>