OVF 1.0 Standardized

Great news this week in the world of virtualized infrastructure. The OVF (Open Virtual Format) has become an official standard. The move paves the way for general adoption of the format. (We've been long time users of the OVF and OVA spec at Enomaly)

Here's a piece of the PR release.

The Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), the industry organization bringing the IT industry together to collaborate on systems management standards development, validation, promotion and adoption, today announced the Virtualization Management Initiative (VMAN). The VMAN Initiative unleashes the power of virtualization by delivering broadly supported interoperability and portability standards to virtual computing environments. VMAN provides IT managers the freedom to deploy pre-installed, pre-configured solutions across heterogeneous computing networks and to manage those applications through their entire lifecycle. This Initiative delivers much-needed open industry standards to the management of virtualized environments.

Virtualization has radically enhanced the IT industry landscape by optimizing usage of existing physical resources and helping reduce the number of systems deployed and managed. This consolidation helps reduce hardware costs and mitigates power and cooling needs. However, even with the efficiencies virtualization offers, this new approach adds IT cost as a result of increased system management complexity.

The VMAN Initiative will help reduce the complexity and cost of virtualization management for IT managers. Also, because the DMTF builds on existing standards for server hardware, management tool vendors can more easily provide holistic management capabilities that allow IT managers to manage their virtual environments in the context of the underlying hardware. This lowers the IT learning curve, and also lowers complexity for vendors implementing this support in their management solutions reducing IT management costs.

Complete Release here >