[ovirt-users] Re: OVA export creates empty and unusable images

Nir, first of all, thanks a lot for the detailed description and the quick fix in 4.4! I guess I'll be able to paste that single line fix into the 4.3. variant myself, but I'd rather see that included in the next 4.3 release, too: How would that work? --- "OVA is not a backup solution": From time to time, try to put youself into a user's shoes. The fist thing you read about Export Domains, is that they are deprecated: That doesn't give you the warm fuzzy feeling that you are learning something useful when you start using them, especially in the context of a migration to the next release. OVA on the other hand, stands for a maximum of interoperability and when given a choice between something proprietary and deprecated and a file format that will port pretty much everywhere, any normal user (who doesn't have the code behind the scene in his mind), will jump for OVA export/import. Also it's just two buttons, no hassle, while it took me a while to get an Export domain defined, filled, detached, re-attached, and tested. Again from a user's perspective: HCI gluster storage in oVirt is black magic, especially since disk images are all chunked up. For a user it will probably take many years of continous oVirt operation until he's confident that he'l recover VM storage in the case of a serious hickup and that whatever might have gone wrong or bitrot might have occured, won't carry over to an export domain. OVA files seem like a nice bet to recover your VM on whatever platform you can get back running in a minor disaster. In many cases, it doesn't even matter you have to shut down the machine to do the export, because the machines are application level redundant or simply it's ok to have them down for a couple of minutes, if you know you can get them back up no matter what in a comparable time frame, oVirt farm dead or alive, e.g. on a bare metal machine. And then my case, many of the images are just meant to move between an oVirt farm and a desktop hypervisor. tl;dr (working) OVA export and import IMHO are elemental and crucial functionality, without which oVirt can't be labelled a product. I completely appreciate the new backup API, especially with the consistency enabled for running VMs; perhaps a little less that I'd have to purchase an extra product to do a fundamental operation with a similar ease as the OVA export/import buttons, but at least it's there. That doesn't mean OVA in/ex isn't important or that in fact a shared import/export domain would be nice, too. Thanks for your time!