Almost one year ago several virtualization vendors and key OEMs agreed to work with the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) on a standard format to define virtual machines.
The list of companies involved at that time included Dell, HP, IBM, Microsoft, VMware and XenSource.
In September 2007, the DMTF was already announcing the first draft of the Open Virtual Format (OVF) and in the following months a lot happened:
- VMware included support for the OVF in its VI 3.5
- VMware hired the DMFT President, Winston Bumpus, as Director of Standards Architecture (and note that Bumpus both roles at the same time)
- The list of vendors working to support OVF grew and included companies like Enomalism and ManageIQ
At the Burton Group’s Catalyst 08 conference, Bumpus revealed that OVF may be ready by the end of this month and linked to the current draft.
XenSource was acquired by Citrix but never formalized the commitment to adopt the standard until today: the company just announced the project codename Kensho to include OVF support into XenServer.
The press announcement also unveil the upcoming support of Microsoft Hyper-V for the the new standard.
So far Microsoft never released any specific statement about its new hypervisor and OVF.
A technical preview of the Citrix implementation of OVF is expected by the Q3 2008.