Does exporting a virtual appliance in OVF format reduce the size of the virtual appliance?
If you are comparing type-for-type conversion, no. OVF adds a negligible amount of metadata overhead. When comparing in a non-type-for-type manner, yes. For example, conversion of a VA from VMware ESX native (VMFS3) format to OVF will typically yield significant footprint reductions, due to the pre-allocated nature of typical VMFS3 format VMDKs compared to the sparse (non-pre-allocated) nature of encapsulation formats favored by OVF. Additional footprint savings may be had using on-the-fly compression of virtual disk objects within the OVF bundle. Detailed technical analysis is outside the scope of this FAQ, interested parties are encouraged to review the VMware VMDK specification and the DMTF draft OVF specification.
Related Questions
- How do I manage the size of a virtual appliance such that I can minimize the size of the distribution, but expand the size of the VMDK when it is installed at a customer location?
- Does exporting a virtual appliance in OVF format reduce the size of the virtual appliance?
- Does VMware provide tools to create virtual appliances in the OVF format?
