Quoting from the Distributed Management Task Force official announcement:
The Distributed Management Task Force, Inc. (DMTF), the industry organization leading the development, adoption and promotion of interoperable management standards and initiatives, today announced the release of a new standard for managing virtualized environments. Five preliminary profiles, all based on DMTF’s Common Information Model, are now publicly available and are ready for implementation. Driven by the efforts of DMTF’s System Virtualization, Partitioning and Clustering (SVPC) work group, the organization is turning standardized virtualization management into reality.
With the first set of virtualization management profiles now available, a number of DMTF member companies and Alliance Partners have already begun implementation. The next step for the SVPC work group is to begin efforts to foster interoperability.
The new standard also recognizes supported virtualization management capabilities, including the ability to:
- discover inventory virtual computer systems
- manage lifecycle of virtual computer systems
- create/modify/delete virtual resources
- monitor virtual systems for health and performance
…
This is a major announcement for the virtualization industry.
VMware, Citrix, Novell, Sun and IBM, all involved in virtual infrastructures management, along with many other partners are supporting this effort.
We’ll see if and when top players as Microsoft, Virtual Iron, SWsoft, Red Hat, and smaller companies busy in virtual lab management, like Surgient and VMLogix, and in virtual machines lifecycle management, like Embotics and ManageIQ, will adhere these new standards.
Standards are available here:
- System Virtualization Profile (DSP1042)
- Virtual System Profile (DSP1057)
- Generic Device Resource Virtualization Profile (DSP1059)
- Resource Allocation Profile (DSP1041)
- Allocation Capabilities Profile (DSP1043)
Update: ManageIQ is the first company in the VM lifecycle management segment to adhere the new standards.