[occi-wg] Opinion Poll: IaaS or PaaS ?

[Sam Johnston]

I'd be surprised if OASIS were working on a new version given it's a DMTF
standard but you're right - it's extensible and it's certainly one format I
expect most, if not all, implementations to support anyway. DMTF are no
doubt very busy rubber stamping VMware's vcloud API at the moment so I doubt
OVF is high on their list of priorities - waiting for news from Thijs
regarding our collaboration with them.

The question then is if we want/need a simpler format ala ElasticHosts:

cores 2
memory 2048
...

We quite probably do (it is after all a fairly simple problem to solve, as
evidenced by the simplicity of your average virtual machine descriptor), and
there are a good few people in support of this. In any case it would be at
least mildly ironic to raise hell over XML in the protocol only to require
it for the data interchange format ;)

Rolling your own OVF file is a bit of a mission compared to sending a few
key value pairs...

Sam

On Sat, Jun 20, 2009 at 6:27 PM, Michael Behrens
<michael.behrens at r2ad.com>wrote:

>  The OVF standard is extensible, so perhaps start with that and then extend
> as needed.  Does anyone know if OASIS is working on a new version?  If so,
> then perhaps a runtime/creation use-case could be submitted.
>
> Krishna Sankar (ksankar) wrote:
>
>  Need to understand a little bit more on this.
>
>
>
> a)      Wouldn’t it be better to add the missing attributes/elements to
> OVF than inventing a new format
>
> b)      The client has to understand something – either OVF or some other
> representation. So why not add to OVF ?
>
> c)       Finally, are there something fundamentally missing from/totally
> incompatible with OVF that it cannot be fixed ?
>
> Cheers
>
> <k/>
>
>
>
> *From:* occi-wg-bounces at ogf.org [mailto:occi-wg-bounces at ogf.org<occi-wg-bounces at ogf.org>]
> *On Behalf Of *Sam Johnston
> *Sent:* Thursday, June 18, 2009 4:20 AM
> *To:* Randy Bias
> *Cc:* occi-wg at ogf.org
> *Subject:* Re: [occi-wg] Opinion Poll: IaaS or PaaS ?
>
>
>
> On Thu, Jun 18, 2009 at 8:32 AM, Randy Bias <randyb at neotactics.com> wrote:
>
>  Sure, but that's not the issue.  The issue is VM portability.  It's
> important, but difficult.  That's my point.  Specifying the hypervisor of an
> image just means the cloud has enough foreknowledge to reject the upload.
>
>
> Exactly. In fact my main concern is that as OVF is only ever used as a
> transport rather than run-time format there are two potentially lossy
> transformations (one to bundle up e.g. a VMware virtual machine to OVF and
> another to unbundle it to say Hyper-V). Any settings that fall outside of
> the OVF net (potentially including critical details such as interface
> parameters) will be ignored at best and lost at worst.
>
> If a client wants to make a VM it should not need to understand OVF so we
> will have our own, simple descriptor language that I imagine will end up
> looking like the stuff in VMX files (example attached). If we are careful
> about how we do this we may well be able to solve the VM portability problem
> as well - something I'm sure many of the open source projects would be happy
> to see.
>
> Sam
>
>
>     On Jun 14, 2009, at 8:38 PM, Sam Johnston wrote:
>
>
>
>  On Mon, Jun 15, 2009 at 5:05 AM, Randy Bias <randyb at neotactics.com>
> wrote:
>
>    If you don't have this capability then allowing the upload of completely
> opaque images and hoping they will have any kind of reasonable performance
> on an arbitrary cloud providers system is a pipe dream.  This is an area
> badly in need of standardization, but I doubt it will come any time soon.
>
>
> Fortunately specifying the type of hypervisor an image is tied to/optimised
> for isn't hard...
>
> Sam
>
>
>
>
> Randy Bias, Cloud Strategist
> +1 (415) 939-8507 [m], randyb at neotactics.com
>
> BLOG: http://cloudscaling.com
>
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
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