Hi Everyone,
 
I am relatively new to libvirt community; have worked on it from last half year mostly towards adding few missing APIs especially for ESX driver. One of the features I worked was installing a domain (VM) using OVAs. It is been a long time OVA became defacto standard for distributing and installing Virtual Machines, but surprisingly libvirt does not provide support for it. I wanted to perform a quick sanity int the community so that I am not stepping on anyone feet here. So far, I have working code, but to contribute upstream would require a bit of a cleanup work.
 
One of the concern that I intend to get inputs on:
 
OVA is a tar format archive, the first pre-requisite is to parse OVA and get following information:
1. XML descriptor.
2.  VMDKs for transfer after domain is created on the hypervisor. (in ESX world that is done by getting a lease object and then transmitting the disk bits to hypervisor)
 
I am wondering, where should I put the common code to parse OVA? My initial thought is to enhance conf/domain_conf.* file, given it already provides parsing routines for XML descriptor. Waiting for your feedback on this one.
 
As I am familiar with ESX libvirt interaction, so the immediate plan is to enhance ESX driver, hopefully in near future will contribute the same feature to KVM/Xen etc.
 
Thanks!
Ata