On Fri, 2011-07-29 at 19:29 +0200, Iustin Pop wrote: > On Fri, Jul 29, 2011 at 08:23:57PM +0400, Michael Tokarev wrote: > > 29.07.2011 18:02, Aaron Toponce wrote: > > > On Tue, Jul 26, 2011 at 12:27:09AM +0200, Moritz Mühlenhoff wrote: > > >> What virtualisation solutions should be supported? > > > > > > Open Virtualization Format (OVF) is the only format that should need to be > > > supported. VirtualBox, VMWare, RHEV, AbiCloud, Citrix XenConvert, and > > > OpenNode all support the format. > > > > The problem with OVF is that it does not define actual disk image > > format, it merely describes the VM for a management layer (like > > libvirt), but makes no big effort to standardize disk format. > > > > So it's basically useless in this context - it's kinda trivial to > > provide the management stuff, the more important bit is the disk > > content. > > I wouldn't put it that strong :) > > While it's true that OVF is 'weak' in respect to disk formats, one can > choose and support a few widely-used formats to cover enough space. > > This is exactly what we're doing now in the Ganeti project - after some > consideration, supporting just raw, vmdk and the qcow variants seems to > have wide-enough use to cover most interoperability issues. Free tools > to convert to/from vhd is what I think is still missing.
FWIW the Xen project has a library (looks like a BSDish license) for reading/writing vhd files, although I don't think there is actually a conversion tool built using them at the moment (it exists as part of the blktap PV disk backend). I expect it would not be too hard to build one though. On the other hand AIUI Virtual Box's vbox-img (GPL) can do VHD conversion already, but I've not tried it myself. > I think that for Debian's purposes, offering one of the above formats > (most likely vmdk) should be good enough, at least for start. Agreed. Ian. -- Ian Campbell Man has made his bedlam; let him lie in it. -- Fred Allen
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