On Mon, May 15, 2017 at 10:43 AM, Eduardo Mayoral <emayoral@arsys.es> wrote:

As a user I must say this is a very welcome feature. I appreciate a lot that oVirt already makes it very easy to import VMs from VMWare .

Allowing to export oVirt machines in OVA format, which as of today is the "lingua franca" of VM migrations offers a nice and clear path out of oVirt. Having an easy way to migrate out of oVirt makes me MORE likely to keep on using oVirt, not less.

There is some confusion around the OVA format that I'd like to clarify. OVA is a very flexible format, in the sense that it's essentially an XML to describe the VM, but the content within may be (and practically is) whatever one feels like. A concrete example is a NIC - it can be (in VMware's case) a vmxnet3 and in our case virtio-net driver. So the fact there's a single XML that describes a VM has absolutely no assurance of an interchangeability. oVirt, via virt-v2v integration, took the additional step to actually perform a conversion from VMware format and drivers and specs to KVM and oVirt. The other way is left as an exercise for the reader, I'm afraid. The goal of this feature, among others, is to more easily share VMs and templates between setups for example. Y. Eduardo Mayoral Jimeno (emayoral@arsys.es)

Administrador de sistemas. Departamento de Plataformas. Arsys internet.+34 941 620 145 ext. 5153 <+34%20941%2062%2001%2045>

On 14/05/17 15:56, Arik Hadas wrote:

Hi everyone,

We would like to share our plan for extending the currently provided support for OVA files with: 1. Support for uploading OVA. 2. Support for exporting a VM/template as OVA. 3. Support for importing OVA that was generated by oVirt (today, we only support those that are VMware-compatible). 4. Support for downloading OVA.

This can be found on the feature page <http://www.ovirt.org/develop/release-management/features/virt/enhance-import-export-with-ova/> .

Your feedback and cooperation will be highly appreciated.

Thanks, Arik

_______________________________________________ Users mailing listUsers@ovirt.orghttp://lists.ovirt.org/mailman/listinfo/users

_______________________________________________ Users mailing list Users@ovirt.org http://lists.ovirt.org/mailman/listinfo/users

On Mon, May 15, 2017 at 6:11 PM, Derek Atkins <derek@ihtfp.com> wrote:

Hi,

Arik Hadas <ahadas@redhat.com> writes:

...

Hi everyone,

We would like to share our plan for extending the currently provided support for OVA files with: 1. Support for uploading OVA. 2. Support for exporting a VM/template as OVA. 3. Support for importing OVA that was generated by oVirt (today, we only support those that are VMware-compatible). 4. Support for downloading OVA.

This can be found on the feature page.

Your feedback and cooperation will be highly appreciated.

Sounds like a great plan.

What's the chance that the export would enable an OVA that could be loaded back into VMware?

I'm afraid that would be too costly. As far as I know, there are pretty good conversion tools for converting VMs from KVM to VMware today [1] (which, btw, I consider to be a strength as Eduardo mentioned before. we certainly not in favor of vendor lock-in). It would only make sense for them to support converting the OVA we produce, much like we extended virt-v2v for converting VMware's OVA not long ago - and I'm pretty sure they won't object to do this, they have all the building blocks - getting a VM as a single archive that complies with the OVA standard should make it easy for them). [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJedam7TJWo (the relevant part starts at 14:40)

...

Thanks, Arik

-derek

-- Derek Atkins 617-623-3745 derek@ihtfp.com www.ihtfp.com Computer and Internet Security Consultant

On Mon, May 15, 2017 at 8:05 PM, Richard W.M. Jones <rjones@redhat.com> wrote:

On Sun, May 14, 2017 at 04:56:56PM +0300, Arik Hadas wrote:

...

Hi everyone,

We would like to share our plan for extending the currently provided support for OVA files with: 1. Support for uploading OVA. 2. Support for exporting a VM/template as OVA. 3. Support for importing OVA that was generated by oVirt (today, we only support those that are VMware-compatible). 4. Support for downloading OVA.

This can be found on the feature page <http://www.ovirt.org/develop/release-management/features/ virt/enhance-import-export-with-ova/> .

Your feedback and cooperation will be highly appreciated.

The plan as stated seems fine, but I have some reservations which I don't think are answered by the page:

(1) How will oVirt know the difference between an OVA generated by oVirt and one generated by VMware (or indeed other sources)? A VMware OVF has an XML comment:

<!--Generated by VMware ESX Server, [...] -->

but not any official metadata that I could see.

So that's something that we have not decided on yet. Indeed, we need some indication of the system that generated the OVA and it makes sense to have it inside the OVF. I thought about a field that is part of the VM configuration, like the "origin" field of VMs in ovirt-engine. Having a comment like you mentioned is also an option.

(By the way, I don't think importing via virt-v2v vs directly will be any quicker. The v2v conversion / device installation takes only a fraction of the time. Most of the time is consumed doing the format conversion from VMDK to qcow2. However you are correct that when you know that the source is oVirt/KVM, you should not run virt-v2v.)

Note that the disks within the OVA will be of type qcow2. So not only that no v2v conversion / device installation is needed, but also no format conversion will be needed on the import and upload flows.

(2) I think you're going to have a lot of fun generating OVAs which work on VMware. As Yaniv says, the devices aren't the same so you'd be having to do some virt-v2v -like driver installation / registry modification. Plus the OVF file is essentially a VMware data dump encoded as XML. OVF isn't a real standard. I bet there are a million strange corner cases. Even writing VMDK files is full of pitfalls.

VMware has a reasonable V2V import tool (actually their P2V tooling is very decent). Of course it's proprietary, but then so is their hypervisor. Maybe oVirt can drive their tools?

No no, that fun is not part of the plan :) The OVAs we'll generate are supposed to contain: 1. OVF - it should be similar to the one virt-v2v generates for oVirt (that is similar to the one we use internally in oVirt for snapshots and for backup within storage domains, i.e., OVF-stores). We will definitely need some extensions, like an indication that the OVA was generated by oVirt. We may make some tweaks here and there, like removing network interfaces from the list of resources. But we already are generally aligned with what the specification says about OVFs. 2. qcow2 disks - thus, no conversion (device installation) and no format conversion will be needed (we may consider to convert them to raw later on, since they are expected to be the base volumes of the disks, not sure it worth the effort though). I will add this to the feature page. We are aware to the fact that with this design, the OVAs could not be directly consumed by others, like VMware. But this could make it easier for them to make the needed conversion - they won't need to query the VM configuration from oVirt and won't need to lookup the disks inside oVirt's storage domains. Anyway, we assume that this conversion is done by other tools.

Rich.

-- Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~ rjones Read my programming and virtualization blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com Fedora Windows cross-compiler. Compile Windows programs, test, and build Windows installers. Over 100 libraries supported. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/MinGW