openstack team mailing list archive

[Diego Parrilla Santamaría <diego.parrilla.santamaria@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.
>
>
There are several subtypes of VMDK disk formats: monolithic, sparse,
streamOptimized and more... some have the information selfcontained, other
needs parameter files, other are compressed, some cannot be executed in
VMware ESX without converting it...

If I am not wrong Glance is like a repository of images to serve the
computing nodes. So probably the sparseOptimized format should be the right
VMDK to use. The problem is it has to be converted to a runnable VMDK type
before deploying it.

My 2 cents,
Diego

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



> 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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