Abiquo is a hypervisor-independent cloud solution that can manage multiple virtualization technologies. It is able to deploy virtual appliances to many different hypervisors, and manage them from a rich web interface. The following sections describe the template disk formats supported by the Abiquo platform, and the formats supported by the hypervisors Abiquo manages.
API Feature
To retrieve the information about Supported Disk Format Types from the Abiquo API, use the requests of the DiskFormatTypes Resource
Supported disk format types
Abiquo supports the disk format types given in this table for OVF import or OVA import.
Abiquo identifies the disk formats by their URIs as given in the following table. These URIs were found in OVF files exported in these formats. However, over time vendors may change their reference information and URIs. Therefore customers who wish to import OVF files should check that their file formats will be correctly identified by Abiquo.
Abiquo will record UNKNOWN as the format for disks that are not in one of the above formats and the user will not be able to deploy VMs from these disks.
Hypervisor compatibility table
The following table shows the different formats supported by the hypervisors. If you upload a template in a format not supported by your hypervisor to the Appliance Library view, Abiquo will convert it to the most suitable format.
The hypervisor default format (also called the base format) for each hypervisor is marked with a 
.
You can configure the list of formats offered and the base format using Abiquo Configuration Properties. See Abiquo configuration properties#pluginmetadata
Format | AWS | ESX/ESXi | Hyper-V | KVM |
|---|---|---|---|---|
RAW |
|
|
|
|
VMDK_FLAT |
|
| ||
VMDK_SPARSE |
| |||
VMDK_STREAM_OPTIMIZED |
| |||
VHD_FLAT |
| |||
VHD_SPARSE |
| |||
VHDX_FLAT |
| |||
VHDX _SPARSE |
| |||
VDI_FLAT | ||||
VDI_SPARSE | ||||
QCOW2_FLAT |
| |||
QCOW2_SPARSE |
| |||
AMI |
| |||
ISO |
|
|
|
Hypervisor default format and conversions
In the above table, the hypervisor default format (also called the base format) for each hypervisor is marked with a . This is the preferred deployment format for this hypervisor, and if there is a disk in the base format, Abiquo will deploy this disk.
Abiquo converts disks from other hypervisor formats into the base format. For example, if you upload a VHD template and you have ESXi hypervisors, Abiquo will convert it into VMDK fixed format
Abiquo will not convert templates that are in other compatible formats for the same hypervisor. For example, if you upload a VMDK Sparse template for ESXi, then Abiquo will deploy the template as a VM with a sparse disk. However, if you somehow have both a sparse and a fixed format for the same disk, Abiquo will deploy the fixed format disk with thin provisioning enabled.
Abiquo will convert an Abiquo instance disk to hypervisor base format, but the administrator can control this conversion with properties. See Abiquo configuration properties#instance
For each hypervisor, the administrator can override the available formats and the default format using properties. See Abiquo configuration properties#pluginmetadata
See also Catalogue concepts#Virtual-to-Virtual Conversion.
Raw format for persistent VMs
The Disk from device or raw format is used for persistent VM templates. Before creating a persistent VM template, Abiquo converts the template's disks to raw format and then dumps them to a volume on the selected storage
Note about ISO disks
Abiquo supports ISO disks, which may be bootable installation disks (added to templates) or data disks (added to VMs). See: