Comments on: OVF? OVA? WTF?

By: MK

MK — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 13:19:03 +0000

Great info on this site. We have started playing around with vmware and looking to scale down some of our back office servers. Thanks.

By: WB

WB — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 02:47:39 +0000

Nice little gotcha on OVA buried in the Converter manual notes. If you have a volume over 9 GB in the OVA you are creating, it will successfully create it but the entire file will be corrupt. Wonderful feature there. Thanks VMWare!

By: Saravuth

Saravuth — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 04:04:15 +0000

It is a wondeful explaination, but base on my experience when export as OVF files is faster than OVA more than 10 time. does any one are facing this problem like me, it take very long time to export to OVA

By: Ian

Ian — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 12:57:39 +0000

Lets see if it comes, it’s against some people’s (VMW) interest to provide this kind of portability
that’s why it was blocked before

By: jason

jason — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 02:41:53 +0000

@Ian
Understood, but the current version of the OVF standard is 1.0. I expect improvements will come in time.

By: Ian

Ian — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 02:04:41 +0000

OVF isn’t the nirvana that it’s reported to be, it’s missing the most important detail – the disk image.
While it does a great job of describing metadata the disk image is poorly defined. Vendors can use their own disk format – eg. vmdk, vhd, qcow, raw, etc so unless your hypervisor supports them all (and to-date no one does) then you have to convert the image before you import.
Then there’s the issue of drivers, what drivers and configuration do you load in the VM? VMware uses scsi emulation or their own PV driver for disk, Xen uses IDE or their own drivers, KVM uses …….. So even if you can read the image you have to swap out the drivers that were installed, or make sure that all OVFs include VMware, Xen, Microsoft, KVM, drivers and config files.

for a homogeneous hypervisor world OVF is fine, but in reality it’s fundamentally flawed

By: pligg.com

pligg.com — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 04:52:40 +0000

OVF? OVA? WTF? » boche.net – VMware Virtualization Evangelist…

If you’ve worked with recent versions of VMware virtual infrastructure, Converter, or Workstation, you may be familiar with the fact that these products have the native ability to work with virtual machines in the Open Virtualization Format, or OVF for…