Almost all the System Administrator have come across these term while administrating their virtual environment. Few years back, when I started my career in IT I didn’t understand what an OVF or OVA were, and what their differences are.
In this blog post I'll try to provide a basic overview of the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) and Open Virtual Appliance (OVA) specification.
What is OVF?
OVF stands for Open Virtualization Format (OVF). The OVF standard was formed by the DMTF (Distributed Management Task Force) which is a nonprofit industry standards organization that creates open manageability standards.
OVF is not just one file, it's a collection of files representing virtual machine metadata(which includes a virtual machine's name, memory and CPU configuration, network, and storage settings, etc), virtual disks, manifest file, certificates, and archive files. These files can be encrypted, digitally signed, compressed, and archived.
An OVF package is a collection of below files required for importing the virtual machine. It is generally packaged in a single folder.
- The .ovf file containing the metadata. (xxx.ovf)
- A manifest file referencing the files of the OVF and their checksum. (xxx.mf)
- One or more .vmdk virtual hard disks. (xxx.vmdk)
- A certificate file (If a user chooses to digitally sign the OVF file). (xxx.cert)
What is OVA?
An Open Virtualization Appliance (OVA) package is a single file archive of the .ovf file, .vmdk file, .mf file and the .cert file(if applicable), stored in TAR or ZIP format.
OVF and OVA formats has lot of advantages, like -
- Since these are compressed files, it can be downloaded very quickly.
- It can encapsulate multi-tiered applications and more than one VM.
- vSphere Client validates OVF/OVA file before importing and it ensures that it is compatible with the destination server.
- Deploying an OVF/OVA allows us to add pre-configured VM in vCenter resulting in faster deployment.
That's it for now friends.
I hope you liked reading this post.
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