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image2class: Virtual Machine Image Import Utility

This section contains the following topics:

Overview

Usage

Limitations

Operation

Overview

The image2class utility imports virtual machine images as appliance classes. This makes it easy for users to migrate workloads from existing virtualization deployments to AppLogic. The virtual machine image that is being imported may be located on either the grid impex volume or on a remote site accessible over HTTP/HTTPS. The appliance class that is created from the virtual machine can either be unmanaged or managed:

• An unmanaged appliance class does not contain any modifications to the imported volumes from the virtual machine image. In this case, the appliance runs in the hardware virtualization mode (HVM).
• A managed appliance class is modified during the import process to use the Appliance Kit (APK), which enhances the appliance with the following characteristics:
  • allows the appliance to define its own boundary which consists of the following:
    • property settings which allow the customization of the appliance behavior and configuration
    • terminals which are used to communicate with other appliances in the same application
    • default interface that is used to access the appliance within the grid shell (ssh)
  • allows the appliance to log informational/error messages to the grid's message log and dashboard to communicate important information to the users
  • ability to collect and analyze appliance resource and performance counters, such as CPU utilization and memory usage
  • reports appliance life-cycle events, such as tracking when the appliance has booted and appliance debugging, to CA AppLogic® for the purposes of life-cycle management

image2class currently supports only virtual machines that comply with the Open Virtualization Format (OVF). For managed appliances, only redhat/debian based OVF images are currently supported. image2class will eventually be extended to support other image formats such as Virtual Hard Disk (VHD). image2class automatically detects the type of image by the file extension of the image.

The image2class utility supports only OVA-style packaging. When importing an OVA image, image2class uses the configuration provided in the .ovf descriptor to generate a class descriptor for the appliance (either a singleton or a catalog class). Because the .ovf descriptor does not provide all of the information needed to properly create an appliance class, image2class provides command line options for specifying/overriding the class configuration (default values are also used where appropriate). If the OVF image contains an appliance class descriptor in ADL format, the utility uses this descriptor for the appliance.