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A flat image allocates space ahead of time while a sparse image grows as the virtual machine writes to it. Flat images can use the underlying file system's sparse file capability, as is done with the vmfs format on ESXi. An image can also refer to a parent image and only store changes made in a copy-on-write fashion. This enables creating a ...
VMware VMFS (Virtual Machine File System) is VMware, Inc.'s clustered file system used by the company's flagship server virtualization suite, vSphere. It was developed to store virtual machine disk images, including snapshots. Multiple servers can read/write the same filesystem simultaneously while individual virtual machine files are locked.
A virtual appliance is a pre-configured virtual machine image, ready to run on a hypervisor; virtual appliances are a subset of the broader class of software appliances. Installation of a software appliance on a virtual machine and packaging that into an image creates a virtual appliance.
VirtualBox emulates hard disks in three formats: the native VDI (Virtual Disk Image), [36] VMware's VMDK, and Microsoft's VHD. It thus supports disks created by other hypervisor software. VirtualBox can also connect to iSCSI targets and to raw partitions on the host, using
VMware software virtualizes the hardware for a video adapter, a network adapter, and hard disk adapters. The host provides pass-through drivers for guest USB, serial, and parallel devices. In this way, VMware virtual machines become highly portable between computers, because every host looks nearly identical to the guest.
Open Virtualization Format (OVF) is an open standard for packaging and distributing virtual appliances or, more generally, software to be run in virtual machines.. The standard describes an "open, secure, portable, efficient and extensible format for the packaging and distribution of software to be run in virtual machines".
[17] [19] [20] Other virtual machine software such as VMWare Workstation and VMware Player can mount raw floppy images in the same way. [21] Windows Virtual PC for Windows 7 (version 6.1) does not offer a user interface for manipulating virtual floppy disks; however, it still supports physical and virtual floppy disks via scripting. [22]
A virtual appliance is a virtual machine image designed to run on a specific virtualization platform, while a software appliance is often packaged in more generally applicable image format (e.g., Live CD) that supports installations to physical machines and multiple types of virtual machines. [4] [5] [6]