Lately I have been playing around in my Lab a lot. I tried many virtual appliances as I wanted to use a variety of workloads. I downloaded many appliances and hoped to have all of them up and running in a bare minimum amount of time. Apparently I miscalculated / underestimated the amount of work to get a virtual appliance up and running. Yes of course there are a whole bunch that will work out of the box, and all of these have one thing in common:
OVF
Yes, deploying virtual appliances is a lot easier when they are packaged as an OVF or even an OVA for that matter. Packaging a virtual appliance which is “tarred” and “gzipped” using an old version of VMware Workstation with a sparse disk format doesn’t cut it any more in the age of automation and transportability. Although that works great on the workstation you developed it on it doesn’t really make it easy for your customer to deploy it.
I am not saying this to make my life easier, but I truly believe that the adoption of a standard like OVF will also increase the adoption of your product. Instead of jumping through hoops to get the appliance running people can focus on what it really is about, your product.
It is time to start adopting OVF.
*Cough* *Cough* Celerra UBER VSA *Cough* has an OVA right? 🙂
Disclaimer:
I work for EMC, like EMC, have a picture of Tucci over my mantle, and make EMC vAppliances as a hobby.
Hear-hear!
+1
etc.
I like .OVA a lot better (which is still part of the OVF standard). True encapsulation in a single file makes the appliance more easily portable.
There is no compression or file size beneift of OVF vs. OVA. I know of no additional benefits of the OVF format other than one might be able to “modify” the texted based descriptor file before deploying it.
I meant to include the following link in my previous reply which is a more detailed analysis of OVF vs. OVA:
http://www.boche.net/blog/index.php/2010/07/02/ovf-ova-wtf/
I’m curious. Have the issues with disks over 8 GB been corrected with the OVA format? I work with OVFs all the time, and we’ve definitely recently experienced issues with disks over 8 GB using the OVA format… so its why we use OVF instead.
We have been using OVF/OVA since VMW started supporting it. It’s a great benefit to our customers. As of vSphere we use the OVF features to prompt the user for deployment information (Management IP, Network, Gateway, DNS).
This allows our customers and evals to go from downloaded file to running application in minutes without any need to jump into CLI or other configuration UI.
I agree that OVF/OVA is optimal for portability. It’s a shame that Converter Stand Alone 4.3 dropped support:
http://www.vmware.com/support/converter/doc/conv_sa_43_rel_notes.html
-C