[moondev]

If proxmox supported OVA and OVF it would be huge. It seems technically possible as there is a new experimental kvm backend for virtual box which supports OVA.

At the end of the day OVA is just machine metadata packaged as XML with all required VM artifacts, there is also some cool things like supporting launch variables. Leveraging the format would bring a bunch of momentum considering all the existing OVAs in the wild

[the_swd]

Proxmox documentation does mention OVF support https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Migrate_to_Proxmox_VE#Import_OV...

Seems a bit barebones, as in no support for a nice OVF properties launch UI, but one should be able to extract an OVA to an OVF and VMDK an manually edit the OVF with appropriate properties.

I actually had plans this week to try exactly that...

[moondev]

Interesting thanks for sharing. Surfacing this in the UI would be great if it works well for sure.

Another handy feature is the ContentLibrary for organizing and launching OVA/OVF, as well as launching OVA directly from a URL without needing to download it next to the cli.

This makes me think there could be an opportunity in "PhotoPea (kvm gui) for vCenter" - in the same manner photopea is a clean room implementation of the photoshop UI/UX

[tlamponi]

  > Interesting thanks for sharing. Surfacing this in the UI would be great if it works well for sure.

That's on the roadmap, from the original forum post linked here:

  > Q: Will other import sources be supported in the future?
  > A: We plan to integrate our OVF/OVA import tools into this new stack in the future.
  >    Currently, integrating additional import sources is not on our roadmap, but will be re-evaluated periodically.

[Underphil]

I've set up a ton of virtual appliances that way. It's just a regular ZIP file with the config and vmdk(s).

[publicmail]

Do you have any more info on this KVM back end for Virtualbox? I love Virtualbox (I know, I know) but the one annoying thing is the dependency on out of tree kernel modules (at least they’re open source though).

[moondev]

https://github.com/cyberus-technology/virtualbox-kvm

I learned of it via:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39300317

Also interesting: vgpu suport (intel srv-io)

https://cyberus-technology.de/articles/vbox-kvm-sriov

[RamRodification]

From the post in case you missed it:

Q: Will other import sources be supported in the future?

A: We plan to integrate our OVF/OVA import tools into this new stack in the future. Currently, integrating additional import sources is not on our roadmap, but will be re-evaluated periodically.