On Wed, Jun 14, 2017 at 2:04 PM, Richard W.M. Jones <rjones@redhat.com> wrote:
As you may know virt-v2v can use the Export Storage Domain (ESD) to
upload converted virtual machines to oVirt.  It was brought to my
attention yesterday that the ESD feature is being dropped, so this
will no longer work at some point in the future.  (BTW I would
appreciate notice if you're going to drop major features that we rely on.)

It caught me by surprise as well while discussing [1].
Allon, has it been shared publicly? if not, can we publicly discuss the high level design and goals of this effort?
 

Although virt-v2v can still work via the GUI, this isn't really
suitable for bulk, scripted upload of hundreds or thousands of VMs.

We now enable triggering that process also via REST-API (this is mostly intended for importing from VMware using ManageIQ, which is expected to be available soon).
 

The ESD method was never very good.  It was sort of an undocumented
back door into oVirt, and it was slow, and still required manual
intervention (after virt-v2v had done its job, you still needed to go
through the GUI and import the guests into the Data Domain).

What we really need is a fully scripted method to upload VMs --
metadata and disk images -- to oVirt.  Maybe one exists already?  If
not, what's the best way to do this?


So besides using the REST-API mentioned above, we may be able to deliver some of the stuff described in [1] before dropping the export domain. With that, we can think of generating an oVirt-compatible OVA as an output of virt-v2v that can be consumed in a similar way to how VMs in the export domain used to be consumed.

Other than that, there is a rumor about introucing a backup-data-domain. Hopefully, that plan will also be shared publicly and we'll know more details about it. If it will be close in concept to the export domain, we may be able to replace the export domain with that domain in virt-v2v.

[1] http://www.ovirt.org/develop/release-management/features/virt/enhance-import-export-with-ova/
 
Rich.

--
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
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