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