This set of patches (well, really only 5/5) introduces a new 'virt-pack' command that packages a virtual machine image for distribution. To make that a littel more interesting, it also generates the necesary information to run the image under VMWare(tm). The intention is to make it as easy as possible for the budding appliance writer to make their appliance widely available. There are lots of choices for a container for a VM image - and they all suck for various reasons (RPM is useless for Windows users, ZIP on Linux can't handle archive members bigger than 4GB, tar is slightly unfriendly for Windows users) I used tarballs since they seem to have the fewest pitfalls. In the future, another format that looks promising is 7zip[1]; in my testing the compression it performed was very impressive (and took impressively long) The Windows implementation of 7zip can read tarballs, too - in theory; in practice it reads _some_ tarballs, but balks at others, unclear what causes that. The VMWare metadata that is added to the image consists of a VMX file and several VMDK files, one for each disk in the image. The VMX is generally dumb and conservative, but worked in my simplistic testing with VMWare Server on XP. VMDK files are primadonnas, despite VMWares docs; I believe that the ones virt-pack generates do work. None of the innards of the VM are taken into account by virt-pack; if you write appliances, you are well served to include a reasonable set of drivers in the images. Don't cut out support for e1000 or rtl8139 to save a few bytes - those 'appliances' exist and distinguish themselves by running only on VMWare and nowhere else. Anyway, I'd be very interested in any comments/feedback, and even more in any experiences with using this to package VM images and run them under libvirt and/or VMWare(tm). David [1] http://p7zip.sourceforge.net/ _______________________________________________ et-mgmt-tools mailing list et-mgmt-tools@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/et-mgmt-tools
