* Richard W.M. Jones (rjo...@redhat.com) wrote: > On Fri, May 18, 2018 at 06:09:56PM +0100, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote: > > The closest to a cross-hypervisor standard is OVF which can store > > metadata about required hardware for a VM. I'm pretty sure it does > > not have the concept of machine types, but maybe it has a way for > > people to define metadata extensions. Since it is just XML at the > > end of the day, even if there was nothing official in OVF, it would > > be possible to just define a custom XML namespace and declare a > > schema for that to follow. > > I have a great deal of experience with the OVF "standard". > TL;DR: DO NOT USE IT.
In addition to the detail below, from reading DMTF's OVF spec (DSP0243 v 2.1.1) I see absolutely nothing specifying hardware type. Sure it can specify size of storage, number of ether cards, MAC addresses for them etc - but I don't see any where specify the type of emualted system. Dave > Long answer copied from a rant I wrote on an internal mailing list a > while back: > > Don't make the mistake of confusing OVF for a format. It's not, > there are at least 4 non-interoperable OVF "format"s around: > > - 2 x oVirt OVF > - VMware's OVF used in exported OVA files > - VirtualBox's OVF used in their exported OVA files > > These are all different and do not interoperate *at all*. So before > you decide "let's parse OVF", be precise about which format(s) you > actually want to parse. > > Also OVF is a hideous format. Many fields are obviously internal data > dumps of VMware structures, complete with internal VMware IDs instead > of descriptive names. Where there are descriptive names, they use > English strings instead of keywords, like: > <rasd:AllocationUnits>MetaBytes</> > or my particular WTF favourite, a meaningful field which references > English (only) Wikipedia: > > <Disk ovf:format="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte"> > > File references are split over two places, and there are other > examples where data is needlessly duplicated or it's unclear what data > is supposed to be. > > Of course VMware Inc. are not stupid enough to use this format for > their own purposes. They use a completely different format (VMX) > which is a lot like YAML. > > Rich. > > -- > Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones > Read my programming and virtualization blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com > Fedora Windows cross-compiler. Compile Windows programs, test, and > build Windows installers. Over 100 libraries supported. > http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/MinGW > -- Dr. David Alan Gilbert / dgilb...@redhat.com / Manchester, UK