Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

ovf

Calling all virtual appliance vendors!

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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.

VMware Studio 2.0 GA’ed

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A couple of weeks ago I wrote about VMware Studio 2.0. VMware Studio 2.0 has just officially been released.

Source:
VMware Studio 2.0 helps author, configure, deploy and customize vApps and virtual appliances. vApps support the industry standard Open Virtualization Format (OVF). vApps can be deployed on VMware vSphere 4.0 or in the cloud. vCenter Server 4.0 now supports creating and running vApps, as well as importing and exporting them in compliance with OVF 1.0 standard.

Studio 2.0 is designed to be used by ISVs, developers, IT professionals and members of the virtualization community. It is a free product and is available as a virtual appliance.

The following new features have been added:

  • Ability to create multiple-VM appliances, or vApps, to run on VMware vSphere.
  • More provisioning engines including ESX/ESXi 3.5 and 4, VMware Workstation 6.5.1, and VMware Server 2.0.
  • Build support for Windows Server 2003 and 2008 (32-bit and 64-bit) virtual appliances.
  • Build support for 64-bit Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and SUSE Enterprise Linux Server (SLES).
  • Build support new Linux distributions RHEL 5.3, CentOS 5.3, and Ubuntu 8.04.1.
  • Extensible management services allow you to customize an interface into a new tab.
  • An Eclipse™ plug-in helps you package applications and create management services.
  • Automatic dependency resolution for application packages installed on Linux-based virtual appliances.
  • Existing VM build (input-as-VM) for Linux virtual appliances.
  • DMTF standard OVF 1.0 and open virtual appliance (OVA) packaging. VMware Studio 1.0 supported OVF 0.9.
  • Eclipse usability improvements.
  • Appliance updates from CDROM.
  • Web console footer customization in the appliance VM.
  • EULA first-boot display control in the appliance VM.
  • Host name editing in the Web console of the appliance VM.
  • Security fix for VMware Studio when uploading management services. See CVE-2009-2968.

Just download it and try it out!

OVF Tool and Nostalgia

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I was trying to convert the great Nostalgia Virtual Appliance to a VMware Workstation compatible format but just copying didn’t work. I did the following to get this thing running directly under VMware Workstation 6.02:

  • I exported the Nostalgia VM from VirtualCenter 2.5 into an OVF format.
  • Copied the OVF files to my PC(d:\ovftools).
  • Downloaded the OVF Tool and unzipped it into: d:\ovftools
  • Ran the following command cause the damn ovf batch file didn’t work: C:\Program Files\Java\jre1.5.0_05\bin\java” -jar d:\ovftool\ovftool.jar d:\ovftool\nostalgia.ovf d:\nostalgia\ (The batchfile was complaining about the fact that the JAVA_Home environment variable wasn’t set, but it actually was…)
  • Now it’s converted to a Workstation 6 compatible VM, just open it and start it.

Let’s see if I can fix that sound in the next couple of days…

Update:
Arne just posted a solution to the JAVA_Home environment error… And I just discovered that the fact that the ovftool.bat doesn’t work is because of the long file names within dos. You’ll have to set the environment variable with an 8.3 notation: JAVA_HOME = C:\Progra~1\Java\jre1.5.0_05\
No quotes or what so ever because VMware already used quotes in the batch file for the if exist statement.