[ovirt-devel] [ovirt-users] Feature: enhanced OVA support

[Arik Hadas]

On Tue, May 16, 2017 at 5:56 PM, Adam Litke <alitke at redhat.com> wrote:

> Great feature!  I am glad to see you plan to use the existing imageio
> framework for transferring data.
>

Yep, and that's the part we need the feedback on the most.


>
> Will you allow export of VMs from a particular snapshot?  I guess that's
> how you'll have to do it if you want to support export of running VMs.
>

Exactly, that's how we intend to support exporting VMs with no downtime.


>
> I think you should definitely have a comment in the ovf to indicate that
> an OVA was generated by a oVirt.  People will try to use this new feature
> to import random OVAs from who knows where.  I'd also recommend adding a
> version to this comment: <!-- Generated by oVirt version 4.1.2 --> or
> perhaps even a schema version in case you need to deal with compatibility
> issues in the future.
>
>
So yeah, there will be some sort of marking - either by a field or a
comment. We'll see about that.
As for the schema version, it already exists in OVFs generated by oVirt
today exactly for that purpose.


> I agree with Yaniv Kaul that we should offer to sparsify the VM to
> optimize it for export.  We should also return compressed data.  When
> exporting, does it make sense to cache the stored OVA file in some sort of
> ephemeral storage (host local is fine, storage domain may be better) in
> order to allow the client to resume or restart an interrupted download
> without having to start from scratch?
>
>
Well, on the one hand it makes sense and I would expect such a mechanism to
be used for image-download as well. On the other hand, we don't support
this concept of pausing ongoing operations or resuming interrupted
opeations on the engine side, so in the context of ova-download (where the
streaming process is comprised of several steps orchestrated by the engine)
supporting this may require too much effort.


>
> On Sun, May 14, 2017 at 9:56 AM, Arik Hadas <ahadas at redhat.com> 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 list
>> Users at ovirt.org
>> http://lists.ovirt.org/mailman/listinfo/users
>>
>>
>
>
> --
> Adam Litke
>
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