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Re: Providing official virtualisation images of Debian



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.

I think that for Debian's purposes, offering one of the above formats
(most likely vmdk) should be good enough, at least for start.

regards,
iustin

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