- Title
- Virtual Appliance Interchange Profile
- Description
- The Virtual Appliance Interchange Profile provides standards and guidance to support the Virtualized Processing Services to exchange virtual appliances between different host platforms.
Taxonomy
Standards
Guidance
To ensure optimization of the exchange of virtual appliances, the following guidelines should be observed.
The environment should be prepared for optimal implementation of a virtual machine (VM).
- Strip down the hardware as much as possible, by removing sound cards, USB controllers, CD-ROM and floppy drives, and para-virtualized devices;
- Minimize the VMs’ HDD footprint to a minimum and use thin provisioning;
- Unmount any removable devices before exporting to Open Virtualization Format (OVF);
- Delete all snapshots;
- Shutdown machine; and
- Include a CRC Integrity Check.
The platform should be able to support the following minimalistic set of hardware features
-
vCPU support minimal two vCPUs supported per VM
-
SCSI disk controller minimal two
-
Virtual SCSI harddisks and optical disk minimal eight
-
IDE nodes
-
Virtual IDE disks
-
Virtual IDE CD-ROMs
-
E1000 (Network Interface)
-
SVGA displays minimal one
-
Serial ports minimal one
Note although OVF defines standard for virtual machine images, there still might be a slight differences how various vendors use it, thus some manual modifications of the OVF files might be necessary before their import.