[Thincrust-devel] issues with zip packaging for appliances
Alan Pevec
apevec at redhat.com
Thu Nov 6 10:44:54 UTC 2008
Perry Myers wrote:
> for the oVirt Appliance, if we have the output format as raw the image
> size is 1.5GB since it is sparse
>
> with the output format as qcow2 the image only drops to 1.2GB
>
> if I take that qcow2 image and put it in a zip file the resulting zip
> file is around 400MB
>
> if I zip the raw 1.5GB image it's also around 400MB (maybe a little bit
> more but not much) This only worked with the Zip64 extensions turned on
> though
>
> So for distribution of appliances qcow2 does not really get you any
> savings. You'd still have to use a compressed package format. We've
> been doing that up until now by putting the image into an RPM which
> compresses it.
We could compressed the image file individually by e.g. gzip/bzip and then package it into zip archive.
virt-image tool would then detect compression and expand the image during the installation.
Is there virt-image for windows? For this plan to work on windows, virt-image would need to be embedded inside the appliance archive.
> So the fundamental question here is... what packaging format can we use that will have good compression, is natively supported on a wide variety of platforms (Unix, Windows, Linux) and will hold raw images that are fairly large.
7-zip.org looks promising but again that's not installed on windoze by default
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