[libvirt-users] Reality check requested...

[Andrew Cathrow]

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Dale Amon" <amon at vnl.com>
> To: "Andrew Cathrow" <acathrow at redhat.com>
> Cc: "Dale Amon" <amon at vnl.com>, libvirt-users at redhat.com, "Eric Blake" <eblake at redhat.com>
> Sent: Monday, April 2, 2012 8:24:16 PM
> Subject: Re: [libvirt-users] Reality check requested...
> 
> On Mon, Apr 02, 2012 at 04:11:17PM -0400, Andrew Cathrow wrote:
> > The disk format should be fine but the VM may not work you didn't
> > say what kind of VM it is - for example is it KVM/Xen/etc
> > VMware uses different emulated hardware and different drivers so
> > your mileage my vary.
> 
> This particular test was a linux Ubuntu server built
> this weekend via virt-manager. The goal is to be able
> to build a disk with the tools I have in linux and
> ship it to someone who is running a current licensed
> ESX version.
> 
> I had the impression that libvirt could handle a vmdk
> from a VMware server; but can it go the other way?

it's not about libvirt it's about your hypervisor.
You say virt-manager but that could be kvm, qemu or xen. I'll presume kvm for now.
KVM emulates a different set of hardware components than VMware does - eg. PIIX3 chipset, IDE (or virtio), ich9 (or maybe ac96/es1379) soundcard, etc
When you take a VM from one platform to another it will see different hardware - eg. it might see SCSI on VMware.
Linux is much better than Windows at adjusting to hardware changes but you have to be careful about how you configure the guest - eg. use emulation (IDE) rather that paravirt devices (VirtIO) that means you lose performance but are more likely for the VM to boot on VMware.



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