A disk format used by default when Prism Central exports an OVA, with VMDK as the other choice. Foundation Central Appliance images also come in it.
Read more: Nutanix docs
In the Ultra Transcenders books
Each book explains QCOW2 in context, with comparison tables and the common traps.
Terms in this definition
- FORMAT
A DAX function that turns a value into text according to a format string, for instance "MMMM" to show a month's name. Since the output is text, numeric operations can't use it, and dynamic format strings were introduced to get around that.
- Prism Central
A standalone instance, made up of either one VM or three in scale-out form, for monitoring and managing many clusters centrally.
- OVA
Open Virtual Appliance, a VM packaged as a single file; the Azure Migrate appliance for VMware is shipped this way, for example.
- VMDK
How a virtual disk is stored: a descriptor file and data on NFS or VMFS, or a vSAN object.
- Foundation Central Appliance
Not to be confused with Foundation Central, the Prism Central app. This separate VM has a simple interface of its own and, on day 0, can image nodes with no cluster formed or build compute clusters backed by external storage.
Related terms
- OVA
Bundles a VM into a single tar file containing an OVF package. Prism Central can produce one from an AHV VM, accept an upload whose disks are VMDK or QCOW2, and create a VM from it.
- VMDK
The file format VMware uses for virtual disks. OVAs imported into Prism Central may contain these or QCOW2 disks.