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Re: [Qemu-block] [Qemu-devel] storing machine data in qcow images?
From: |
Dr. David Alan Gilbert |
Subject: |
Re: [Qemu-block] [Qemu-devel] storing machine data in qcow images? |
Date: |
Tue, 29 May 2018 15:03:16 +0100 |
User-agent: |
Mutt/1.9.5 (2018-04-13) |
* Richard W.M. Jones (address@hidden) wrote:
> On Fri, May 18, 2018 at 06:09:56PM +0100, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
> > The closest to a cross-hypervisor standard is OVF which can store
> > metadata about required hardware for a VM. I'm pretty sure it does
> > not have the concept of machine types, but maybe it has a way for
> > people to define metadata extensions. Since it is just XML at the
> > end of the day, even if there was nothing official in OVF, it would
> > be possible to just define a custom XML namespace and declare a
> > schema for that to follow.
>
> I have a great deal of experience with the OVF "standard".
> TL;DR: DO NOT USE IT.
In addition to the detail below, from reading DMTF's OVF spec (DSP0243 v
2.1.1) I see absolutely nothing specifying hardware type.
Sure it can specify size of storage, number of ether cards, MAC
addresses for them etc - but I don't see any where specify the type of
emualted system.
Dave
> Long answer copied from a rant I wrote on an internal mailing list a
> while back:
>
> Don't make the mistake of confusing OVF for a format. It's not,
> there are at least 4 non-interoperable OVF "format"s around:
>
> - 2 x oVirt OVF
> - VMware's OVF used in exported OVA files
> - VirtualBox's OVF used in their exported OVA files
>
> These are all different and do not interoperate *at all*. So before
> you decide "let's parse OVF", be precise about which format(s) you
> actually want to parse.
>
> Also OVF is a hideous format. Many fields are obviously internal data
> dumps of VMware structures, complete with internal VMware IDs instead
> of descriptive names. Where there are descriptive names, they use
> English strings instead of keywords, like:
> <rasd:AllocationUnits>MetaBytes</>
> or my particular WTF favourite, a meaningful field which references
> English (only) Wikipedia:
>
> <Disk ovf:format="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte">
>
> File references are split over two places, and there are other
> examples where data is needlessly duplicated or it's unclear what data
> is supposed to be.
>
> Of course VMware Inc. are not stupid enough to use this format for
> their own purposes. They use a completely different format (VMX)
> which is a lot like YAML.
>
> 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
>
--
Dr. David Alan Gilbert / address@hidden / Manchester, UK
- Re: [Qemu-block] [Qemu-devel] storing machine data in qcow images?, (continued)
- Re: [Qemu-block] [Qemu-devel] storing machine data in qcow images?, Gerd Hoffmann, 2018/05/22
- Re: [Qemu-block] [Qemu-devel] storing machine data in qcow images?, Eduardo Habkost, 2018/05/22
- Re: [Qemu-block] [Qemu-devel] storing machine data in qcow images?, Michael S. Tsirkin, 2018/05/22
- Re: [Qemu-block] [Qemu-devel] storing machine data in qcow images?, Kevin Wolf, 2018/05/22
- Re: [Qemu-block] [Qemu-devel] storing machine data in qcow images?, Eduardo Habkost, 2018/05/22
- Re: [Qemu-block] [Qemu-devel] storing machine data in qcow images?, Fam Zheng, 2018/05/22
- Re: [Qemu-block] [Qemu-devel] storing machine data in qcow images?, Kevin Wolf, 2018/05/23
- Re: [Qemu-block] [Qemu-devel] storing machine data in qcow images?, Michael S. Tsirkin, 2018/05/23
Re: [Qemu-block] [Qemu-devel] storing machine data in qcow images?, Richard W.M. Jones, 2018/05/24
Re: [Qemu-block] [Qemu-devel] storing machine data in qcow images?, Richard W.M. Jones, 2018/05/24
Re: [Qemu-block] [Qemu-devel] storing machine data in qcow images?, Max Reitz, 2018/05/28