After a process lasted more than one year, last month the DMTF finally ratified the Open Virtualization Format (OVF).
Despite the announcement, the 1.0 document of specifications available here doesn’t seem to be definitive (document status: Preliminary Standard).
Definitive or not, a lot of companies are already supporting the standard:
- VMware (which supports it since Infrastructure 3.0 and even released a free authoring tool called Studio)
- Citrix (which will support it next year)
- IBM (which is maintaining open source authoring tools)
- Microsoft (even if there’s no official statement at the moment)
- Enomaly (supporting it since the earliest draft)
- ManageIQ (which supported it in its new EVM Suite 2.0)
- Fortisphere (which just announced the upcoming support)
All other virtualization vendors offering cross-platform management tools are expected to support it in the coming months. Hopefully the format of our virtual machines will be a problem that we don’t have to care of anymore.