[Thincrust-devel] issues with zip packaging for appliances

[Perry Myers]

Alan Pevec wrote:
> 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.

That doesn't cover cases where you want the disk image to be used in 
VMware on Windows or another hypervisor that isn't supported by virt-image.

The only thing we could do is use a packaging format that is not supported 
natively on Windows like tar.gz...

Perry