openstack team mailing list archive

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

2011/1/14 Jay Pipes <jaypipes@xxxxxxxxx>

> 2011/1/14 Diego Parrilla Santamaría <diego.parrilla.santamaria@xxxxxxxxx>:
> > 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
>
> Helpful link, thanks Diego :)
>
> Followup question, based partly on the table of supported disk
> formats: instead of the general VMDK as a disk format, should we have
> a more broken-down format for, say, sparse VMDK?
>
> In other words, how fine-grained should the metadata about an image in
> Glance be?
>
>
Jay,

I think VMDK subtypes are very relevant information and has to be indicated
before a deployment. Just an example: if you try to deploy a streamOptimized
or even some sparse formats directly to VMware ESXi they won't work, and
troubleshooting for newbies can be complicated.

I'm not very famliar with Glance yet. So may be some of my asumptions can
sound stupid...

I guess that one of the main purpose of Glance is to deal with Object
Storage Services (Swift or S3 for example) because they are the best
candidates to store virtual images. I think this is a 'necessary evil': such
a big images must be stored somewhere.

What I don't really get is how Glance is going to deal with all the
different virtual images formats supported for the different hypervisors. I
mean, who is going to convert from virtual image format X to the virtual
image format needed by hypervisor Y? Is Glance responsible for this or the
Compute Node? May be if you explain me a little bit how it will work I can
be more helpful. I'm still with Austin and I will start to work on the Bexar
branch very soon.

Regards
Diego

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


> -jay
>