Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), the organization bringing the IT industry together to collaborate on systems management standards development, validation, promotion and adoption, today announced that its Open Virtualization Format (OVF) standard version 1.1 has been adopted as an American National Standards Institute (ANSI) International Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS) standard.
This achievement marks a major milestone in DMTF’s efforts to enable interoperable, platform-independent cloud and virtual management solutions.
OVF has been designated as ANSI INCITS 469 2010 by the INCITS Executive Board. INCITS is accredited by ANSI, the organization that oversees the development of American National Standards. ANSI accreditation signifies that the procedures used by the standards body in connection with the development of American National Standards meet the Institute’s essential requirements for openness, balance, consensus and due process.
DMTF will continue to work with INCITS to submit OVF to the International Standards Organization/International Electrotechnical Commission (ISO/IEC) for adoption as an international standard.
First published in March 2009, OVF simplifies interoperability, security and machine lifecycle management by describing an open, secure, portable, efficient and extensible format for the packaging and distribution of workloads consisting of one or more virtual machines and applications. This enables software developers to ship pre-configured, ready-to-deploy solutions and allows end-users to distribute applications into their environments with minimal effort. OVF is the cornerstone of DMTF’s virtualization standards efforts and is also considered an important foundation for the organization’s cloud standards development.