----- Original Message -----
From: "Dale Amon" <amon@vnl.com> To: "Andrew Cathrow" <acathrow@redhat.com> Cc: "Dale Amon" <amon@vnl.com>, libvirt-users@redhat.com, "Eric Blake" <eblake@redhat.com> Sent: Monday, April 2, 2012 8:24:16 PM Subject: Re: [libvirt-users] Reality check requested...
On Mon, Apr 02, 2012 at 04:11:17PM -0400, Andrew Cathrow wrote:
The disk format should be fine but the VM may not work you didn't say what kind of VM it is - for example is it KVM/Xen/etc VMware uses different emulated hardware and different drivers so your mileage my vary.
This particular test was a linux Ubuntu server built this weekend via virt-manager. The goal is to be able to build a disk with the tools I have in linux and ship it to someone who is running a current licensed ESX version.
I had the impression that libvirt could handle a vmdk from a VMware server; but can it go the other way?
it's not about libvirt it's about your hypervisor. You say virt-manager but that could be kvm, qemu or xen. I'll presume kvm for now. KVM emulates a different set of hardware components than VMware does - eg. PIIX3 chipset, IDE (or virtio), ich9 (or maybe ac96/es1379) soundcard, etc When you take a VM from one platform to another it will see different hardware - eg. it might see SCSI on VMware. Linux is much better than Windows at adjusting to hardware changes but you have to be careful about how you configure the guest - eg. use emulation (IDE) rather that paravirt devices (VirtIO) that means you lose performance but are more likely for the VM to boot on VMware.