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Distributed Management Task Force

DMTF’s Open Virtualization Format 1.1 Receives Thumbs Up From ANSI

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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.

DMTF Announces Virtualization Management Forum Formation

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The Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) today announced the formation of its Virtualization Management (VMAN) Forum, a group dedicated to promoting interoperability between products that support the VMAN standards. The forum will develop and conduct programs to determine specification conformance in the areas of system virtualization management, virtual system management, and the open virtualization format.

The VMAN Forum plans to develop a set of test tools for measuring conformance to the specifications included in DMTF’s VMAN Initiative. These tools will allow DMTF members to confirm the conformance level of their products that implement DMTF virtualization management standards. The forum also plans to host plugfests to help identify interoperability issues among various implementations and validate conformance testing procedures.

Twenty leading companies in the virtualization management industry are currently participating in the VMAN Forum. These companies include:

  • Broadcom
  • Cisco
  • Citrix Systems
  • Dell
  • Emulex
  • Fortisphere
  • Hewlett-Packard Company
  • Hitachi
  • IBM
  • Infosys Technologies Limited
  • Intel Corporation
  • Microsoft Corporation
  • NextIO
  • Novell
  • SAP AG
  • Solarflare Communications
  • Sun Microsystems
  • Symantec Corporation
  • VMware
  • WBEM Solutions

Membership in the VMAN Forum is open to all DMTF members.

Embedded below is our earlier video interview with DMTF President Winston Bumpus:

Sun Releases VirtualBox 2.2, Comes With OVF Support

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Sun Microsystems today announced the availability of Sun VirtualBox 2.2, the latest release of its free and open source virtualization software. VirtualBox 2.2 introduces support for the new Open Virtualization Format (OVF) standard, as well as significant performance enhancements and updates.

OVF is a Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) standard that enables virtual machines or appliances to be imported and exported. Virtual appliances are one or more virtual machines that are pre-installed and configured so they can be shared, published and distributed. VirtualBox 2.2 software enables users to build virtual machines or appliances and effortlessly export them from a development environment and import them into a production environment. Support for OVF also helps to ensure VirtualBox 2.2 software is interoperable with other technologies that follow the standard.

A key component of Sun’s industry-leading desktop-to-datacenter virtualization portfolio, VirtualBox software has been rapidly growing in popularity, surpassing 11 million downloads worldwide, 3.5 million registrations since October 2007, with in excess of 25,000 downloads a day. A mere 50 megabyte download, VirtualBox software is incredibly compact and efficient and installs in less than five minutes.

Additional features of VirtualBox 2.2 software include:

  • Hypervisor optimizations to make this the fastest VirtualBox release available to date
  • 3D graphics acceleration for Linux and Solaris applications using OpenGL, allowing a whole new class of applications to run in a virtual machine
  • Support for Snow Leopard, Apple’s forthcoming 64 bit platform
  • Increased maximum memory size of guests to 16Gb RAM
  • New host-interface networking mode, which makes it easier than ever before to run server applications in virtual machines

VirtualBox software is free of charge for personal use. For wider deployments within an organisation Enterprise subscriptions are also available, starting at $30 (USD) per user per year, which includes 24/7 premium support from Sun’s technical team. Discounts are available based on volume.

Citrix Systems Newest Member Of The Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) Board

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The Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) today announced that it has elected Citrix Systems to its board of directors. In addition, CA, which was appointed to the Board last year, was elected to a full term and joins Advanced Micro Devices, CA, EMC, Fujitsu, IBM, and Microsoft Corporation who were re-elected to the board. These seven companies join Broadcom, Dell, HP, Hitachi, Intel Corporation, Novell, Oracle, Sun Microsystems and VMware to drive the development of DMTF standards and initiatives in 2009.

The DMTF board of directors works together to set cross-industry priorities, promote interoperability for enterprise and Internet environments, foster alliance partnerships and lead the organization’s committee work. DMTF technologies are designed to address the industry’s requirements for interoperable distributed management, providing valuable tools for managing multiple platforms.

“Citrix looks forward to sharing our considerable expertise in the enterprise to alleviate the challenges of managing complex IT environments,” said Abolfazl Sirjani, CTO Office and senior director of advanced products at Citrix. “Over the past 20 years, we have had the privilege of being part of the fabric of many blue-chip companies, in 100 million corporate desktops and 1 million datacenter servers. Our solutions, best practices and ongoing research and development should be of great benefit both to DMTF and to the industry as a whole.”

Sirjani will represent Citrix on the board. Other individuals representing the board member companies include:

  • Valerie Kane, AMD
  • Uri Elzur, Broadcom
  • Paul Lipton, CA
  • Jon Hass, Dell
  • Wayne Adams, EMC
  • Hiro Kishimoto, Fujitsu
  • Jishnu Mukerji, HP
  • Nobutoshi Sagawa, Hitachi, Ltd.
  • Mike Baskey, IBM
  • Kevin Cline, Intel Corporation
  • Josh Cohen, Microsoft Corporation
  • Robert Wipfell, Novell
  • Tony DiCenzo, Oracle
  • Mark Carlson, Sun Microsystems
  • Winston Bumpus, VMware

Citrix’s Open Source “Project Kensho” Tech Preview Now Available Under LGPL

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Citrix recently announced “Project Kensho,” which would deliver Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF) tools that allow independent software vendors (ISVs) and enterprise IT managers to easily create hypervisor-independent, portable enterprise application workloads.

Well, it looks like Citrix just released the first technical preview of project Kensho under the LGPL license.

Because the tools are based on an industry standard schema, customers are ensured a rich ecosystem of options for virtualization.  And because of the open-standard format and special licensing features in OVF, customers can seamlessly move their current virtualized workloads to either XenServer or Windows Server 2008, enabling them to distribute virtual workloads to the platform of choice while simultaneously ensuring compliance with the underlying licensing requirements for each virtual appliance.

Citrix also announced a partnership with rPath to build and deliver new virtual appliances by assembling Linux packages “like Lego bricks”. The two are working together to allow rPath’s rBuilder to inject OVF virtual appliances directly into Xen-based cloud computing environments, like Amazon EC2. This collaboration will allow Linux and Windows based OVF appliances created on XenServer, Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V or Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 to be installed and run in the cloud and managed through their entire lifecycle.

Citrix Systems

DTMF Accepts Draft Specification for Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF)

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The Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) today announced the acceptance of a draft specification submitted by leading virtualization companies (VMware, Oracle and CA recently joined the task force) targeting an industry standard format for portable virtual machines. Virtual machines packaged in this format can be installed on any virtualization platform that supports the standard simplifying interoperability, security and virtual machine lifecycle management for virtual infrastructures.

The companies behind the collaboration on this specification include Dell, HP, IBM, Microsoft, VMware, and XenSource. This group of virtualization industry leaders has submitted the specification to the DMTF for development into an industry standard. DMTF is the industry organization leading the development, adoption and promotion of interoperable management initiatives and standards. DMTF will continue to develop this technology into a successful, open industry standard and promote it worldwide.

The proposed format, called the Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF), uses existing packaging tools to combine one or more virtual machines together with a standards-based XML wrapper, giving the virtualization platform a portable package containing all required installation and configuration parameters for the virtual machines. This allows any virtualization platform that implements the standard to correctly install and run the virtual machines.

(IBM recently announced its open-ovf project.)

Most importantly, OVF specifies procedures and technologies to permit integrity checking of the virtual machines (VM) to ensure that they have not been modified since the package was produced. This enhances the security of the format and will alleviate security concerns of users who adopt virtual appliances produced by third parties. OVF also provides mechanisms that support license checking for the enclosed VMs, addressing a key concern of both independent software vendors (ISVs) and customers. Finally, OVF allows an installed VM to acquire information about its host virtualization platform and run-time environment, which allows the VM to localize the applications it contains and optimize its performance for the particular virtualization environment.

In addition to providing portability, integrity, and configurability of existing virtual hard disk formats. OVF is also extensible to support future developments of virtual hard disk formats whose specifications are openly available.