While waiting for the final release of the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) standard, several companies are working to support the technology and release proper toolkits to facilitate the adoption.
In particular Citrix announced that OVF support will come in beta this quarter, and that a comprehensive toolkit (project Kensho) will be released to perform a basic set of actions.
IBM is working on the open source part of that toolkit, and will maintain it over time.
VMware officially supports OVF since December 2007 and demonstrates the competitive advantage by releasing VMware Studio 1.0.
The first release (build 620) of this tool allows to build OVF images for any virtual machine through a web console for authoring and source control.
Better than that VMware Studio allows to push new updated directly where the OVF image is deployed.
Download it here.
The open source components used in this tool are available here.
Thanks to Scott Lowe for the news.