Scott Moser from IBM’s Systems Technology Group has released the first version of the open-ovf project. OVF is a standard packaging format for virtual machines and software appliances. The open-ovf project is seeking contributors and users to help establish OVF as a transparent and platform-neutral method for packaging virtual machine images.
The goal of open-ovf is to be able to deploy a single OVF package to either Xen or KVM.
Eventually expanding that list to include VMware, Hyper-V, and other platforms. For that goal they are looking at community contributions. A good start might be the qemu-img tool that already knows how to convert between different formats.
The Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) has defined a vendor-neutral standard for packaging virtual appliances enabling automated installation, configuration and activation of any virtualization platform. The Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF) specification describes an open, secure, portable, efficient and extensible format for packaging
For a summary of OVF and the open source project, see the presentation from the recent Xen summit
The open-ovf project is hosted on sourceforge and the source code is available from it’s git repository
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