[libvirt] RFC: Enable Libvirt to handle OVA installation

[Doug Goldstein]

On Thu, Dec 6, 2012 at 5:41 PM, Ata Bohra <ata.husain at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>> > install() (Please suggest if there can be more routines to this driver,
>> > it can be enhanced later as well).
>> > It is possible to design this driver to handle OVA parsing as well, but
>> > I think keeping it in
>> > 'util' may make that code available for all hypervisors given OVA format
>> > does not change per
>> > hypervisor. I'm inclined more towards 2.2 design as it is more generic
>> > and provides room for furture extensions. Looking forward for
>> > comments/suggestions. Thanks!Ata
>>
>> I really don't want to see OVA support integrated into libvirt APIs.
>> libvirt aims to only provide the mechanism for virt management. OVA,
>> however, is a policy based approach to virt management. As such it
>> should be done by a layer above libvirt, which simply makes use of
>> the libvirt mechanism to accomplish its work. If there are specific
>> things that libvirt is missing, which prevent this layering, then
>> feel free to propose enhancements to the libvirt APIs to enable it.
>
> [AB]:  Unfortunately I could not find any way to perform this rather than
> accomodating it inside libvirt. As mentioned more of the issue is: OVA
> installation is handled by hypervisor in more than one step, they do not
> expose specific APIs to load compressed disk associated with one VM, please
> correct me if my understanding is wrong here. It means then this feature
> could be blessed within libvirt framework at all :(.
>
> For educational purpose, I want to ask why is "OVA installtion" is
> considered so alien. To me it is one of the ways to manage VM distribution
> in an hypervisor agnostic way.
>

Point me to an OVA that's available and a way to load it & run it
without forking money over to VMWare and I'll take a look and provide
suggestions on how to best implement this for you.

-- 
Doug Goldstein