I'd be surprised if OASIS were working on a new version given it's a DMTF standard but you're right - it's extensible and it's certainly one format I expect most, if not all, implementations to support anyway. DMTF are no doubt very busy rubber stamping VMware's vcloud API at the moment so I doubt OVF is high on their list of priorities - waiting for news from Thijs regarding our collaboration with them. The question then is if we want/need a simpler format ala ElasticHosts: cores 2 memory 2048 ... We quite probably do (it is after all a fairly simple problem to solve, as evidenced by the simplicity of your average virtual machine descriptor), and there are a good few people in support of this. In any case it would be at least mildly ironic to raise hell over XML in the protocol only to require it for the data interchange format ;) Rolling your own OVF file is a bit of a mission compared to sending a few key value pairs... Sam On Sat, Jun 20, 2009 at 6:27 PM, Michael Behrens <michael.behrens@r2ad.com>wrote:
The OVF standard is extensible, so perhaps start with that and then extend as needed. Does anyone know if OASIS is working on a new version? If so, then perhaps a runtime/creation use-case could be submitted.
Krishna Sankar (ksankar) wrote:
Need to understand a little bit more on this.
a) Wouldn’t it be better to add the missing attributes/elements to OVF than inventing a new format
b) The client has to understand something – either OVF or some other representation. So why not add to OVF ?
c) Finally, are there something fundamentally missing from/totally incompatible with OVF that it cannot be fixed ?
Cheers
<k/>
*From:* occi-wg-bounces@ogf.org [mailto:occi-wg-bounces@ogf.org<occi-wg-bounces@ogf.org>] *On Behalf Of *Sam Johnston *Sent:* Thursday, June 18, 2009 4:20 AM *To:* Randy Bias *Cc:* occi-wg@ogf.org *Subject:* Re: [occi-wg] Opinion Poll: IaaS or PaaS ?
On Thu, Jun 18, 2009 at 8:32 AM, Randy Bias <randyb@neotactics.com> wrote:
Sure, but that's not the issue. The issue is VM portability. It's important, but difficult. That's my point. Specifying the hypervisor of an image just means the cloud has enough foreknowledge to reject the upload.
Exactly. In fact my main concern is that as OVF is only ever used as a transport rather than run-time format there are two potentially lossy transformations (one to bundle up e.g. a VMware virtual machine to OVF and another to unbundle it to say Hyper-V). Any settings that fall outside of the OVF net (potentially including critical details such as interface parameters) will be ignored at best and lost at worst.
If a client wants to make a VM it should not need to understand OVF so we will have our own, simple descriptor language that I imagine will end up looking like the stuff in VMX files (example attached). If we are careful about how we do this we may well be able to solve the VM portability problem as well - something I'm sure many of the open source projects would be happy to see.
Sam
On Jun 14, 2009, at 8:38 PM, Sam Johnston wrote:
On Mon, Jun 15, 2009 at 5:05 AM, Randy Bias <randyb@neotactics.com> wrote:
If you don't have this capability then allowing the upload of completely opaque images and hoping they will have any kind of reasonable performance on an arbitrary cloud providers system is a pipe dream. This is an area badly in need of standardization, but I doubt it will come any time soon.
Fortunately specifying the type of hypervisor an image is tied to/optimised for isn't hard...
Sam
Randy Bias, Cloud Strategist +1 (415) 939-8507 [m], randyb@neotactics.com
BLOG: http://cloudscaling.com
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