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0e1f616
(Get the code!)
Hi John,
Apologies for the delay in replying to your earlier questions.
VMware's current documentation [1] on OVF files are limited to providing guidance to end-users that describes workflows like exporting VMs to OVF format and importing back to VMs. We currently do not have documentation focused on ISVs who are programmatically generating OVF files. In a conversation with internal technical leaders yesterday, we agreed that there is a need to provide better documentation for ISVs. It would be a significant amount of effort to produce a human authored document that describes all of the many virtual devices and settings supported by VMware VMs and it would difficult to maintain the document in sync with the software. As a result, we plan to investigate adapting some of our internal software that can read and write OVF files to also automatically produce more detailed documentation on the supported virtual devices. Using this approach, the documentation and software will be in sync. In the mean time, the best way to figure out how to represent something in OVF format is to create a VM on ESXi using that configuration, export the VM to OVF/OVA format and look at the contents of the OVF file...
We agree that using chroot environment to build OVA is the best approach and the most secure. To help ISVs with this process we previously published the open-vmdk project [2] that can help automate this process using open-source code that can be included in third-party build systems. This code can convert flat file system to vmdk format. @jchittum, Is Canonical using open-vmdk code to create ovf and vmdk files or some other approach like qemu?
Regarding virtual devices supported by different generations for VMware VMs, the best source of information is vSphere's documentation on virtual hardware versions [3]. A project is underway to improve these docs and you should expect to see enhancements by the end of the year published.
Regarding testing of OVA images, VMware can help. Please reach out to Yuhua Zou who created this bug and Haiying Ding (<email address hidden>). For automation of testing, please check out the open-source project [4] that provides an ansible environment to test operating systems on vSphere/ESXi. Canonical should have access to not-for-resale (NFR) licenses for VMware products that can be used for internal testing through VMware TAP program [5]. To access these licenses contact Dorian Naveh inside Canonical.
Please let us know if you have any other questions.
Thanks,
John
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