Re: [libvirt] RFC: Enable Libvirt to handle OVA installation
Please see inline.> Date: Wed, 5 Dec 2012 17:24:00 -0600
Subject: Re: [libvirt] RFC: Enable Libvirt to handle OVA
installation
From: cardoe(a)gentoo.org
To: ata.husain(a)hotmail.com
CC: libvir-list(a)redhat.com
On Wed, Dec 5, 2012 at 3:50 PM, Ata Bohra <ata.husain(a)hotmail.com> wrote:
> This is a proposal to enhance Libvirt library to handle OVA package
> installation.
>
> OVA:
> OVA is one of the widely accepted and consortium defined/maintained format
> for
> Virtual Machine distros. Technically it is a tar file with three main
> components:
> 1. VMX descriptor (XML file defining virtual machine specifics such as:
> virtual hardware etc.
> 2. VMDKs in a compressed format.
> 3. Manifest file.
>
I thought this was discussed previously on the list before and the
idea was to provide something similar to virt-v2v to convert from OVA
into libvirt. Since effectively OVA machines are not really tied to
any one virtualization solution but could be qemu or VMWare (or maybe
VBox) VMs. It just the disk image and some high level definitions
about the hardware.
Or are you intending on this just being another storage driver for the
VMWare driver?
[AB] : Yes Doug, I remember you suggesting this idea earlier. I
investigated this option trying to figure out how this can be done. It is not difficult to
convert OVA description in to libvirt (with adding some exceptions etc) but then I hit the
roadblock when it came to transfer of VM disk(s). OVA represents the disk in a compressed
form and ESX hypervisor does not provide any API to upload compressed disk. Whereas, one
of the steps in OVA installation is ESX providing you a lease object that allows uploading
OVA compressed disk to the hypervisor that gets expanded internally. I'm not sure but
I believe I reverted back with this observation. Do you think adding a driver object to
handle OVA installation per specific hypervisor enviornment breaks the abstraction? I
thought it would allow plugging right solution given the nature of hypervisor. > --
Doug Goldstein
Thanks!Atahttp://abohra-libvirt.blogspot.com/
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