[Ovirt-devel] Appliance disk format

[David Lutterkort]

On Wed, 2008-02-20 at 12:57 +0000, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> Yes, i guess the question is what do we want the deployable disk format to
> be. raw vs qcow2 ?  That in turn impacts the decision on compression needs
> for re-distribution.

That is indeed the 640GB question: when you deploy an image directly
(i.e., w/o a virt mgmt system) what kind of tradeofs are acceptable ?
The biggest issue here is the performance impact of writing to a
compressed qcow disk ... does it matter ? Do we even care or just assume
that 'serious' users will deploy VM images through a management system
that will convert disks during deployment anyway.

The other question: how do you make one VM image useful on as many
virtualization platforms as possible. I really dislike the crazy
download pages on rBuilder where you can download the same image in
literally 20 different formats; that's insanely confusing to the user. 

At the same time, trying to build one image that runs on a reasonable
swath of virt platforms forces a very low common denominator (i.e., raw
disks) <sarcasm>Luckily, OVF will fix all that</sarcasm>

> > [1] Patches I sent to et-mgmt-tools in Dec; I don't think I ever
> > committed them.
> 
> Hmm, I remember those, but never got time to review that at the time. We
> shoudl re-visit them.

The thread is
https://www.redhat.com/archives/et-mgmt-tools/2007-December/msg00072.html. Haven't touched them since then.

David