OpenStack Compute (nova)

How does Nova support OVF?

Asked by Pham Viet

Our team is building an OVF appliance which contains multiple virtual machines. Our target is that it can be installed on OpenStack in one click. Sadly at this moment Nova does not recognize OVF format, and we see no milestone to support OVF in the future.

So our question is do you intend to support OVF in the near future?

If not, is there currently any third party tool or script we can use to import/export OVF?

And how should we set up the OVF environment transport to carry the settings into the virtual machine?

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Michael Still
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Best Michael Still (mikal) said : 		#1

I am not aware of any plans to implement OVF, which seems to be a format for describing the resources that a virtual machine needs to boot. The way to go to implement something like this would be a client side tool which takes the OVF and converts it to a series of OpenStack or EC2 API calls. Again, I am not aware of anyone working on such a thing at this time.

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Pham Viet (vietph) said : 		#2

Thanks a lot Michael, that answers my question. Btw do you know of any third party script/tool that we can use in this case? Otherwise we may have to start from scratch ... :sigh:

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Keith Tobin (keith-tobin) said : 		#3

Openstack glance supports OVF format.

http://docs.openstack.org/developer/glance/formats.html

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Keith Tobin (keith-tobin) said : 		#4

I am not sure that a OVF with many images is supported in openstack, but I would just separate the images for deployment to openstack.

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Pham Viet (vietph) said : 		#5

Hi Keith, by that do you mean OpenStack already supports single-image OVF?

As far as I know Glance can only extract and store the OVF file. As Nova does nothing with that OVF file, the OVF package can not deploy even for single-image case.

Please correct me if I'm wrong.

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Keith Tobin (keith-tobin) said : 		#6

You are 100% correct on both statements.